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FACSIMILE OF THE SIGNATURES TO THE TREATY OF 
GHENT 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS 
OF PEACE 



BY 
HENRY CABOT LODGE 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 



Wefa gorfe 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1913 

All rights reserved 



G1 






COPTMSHT, 1912, 

By the outlook COMPANY. 



COPYBIGHT, 1913, 

By the MAOMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1913. 



J. 8. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



PREFATOKY NOTE 

This sketch of the relations between the United 
States and Great Britain during the century which 
has elapsed since the War of 1812 appeared first in 
the "Outlook." To the publishers of the "Out- 
look " I wish to express my thanks for their kind 
permission to reprint here the two original articles 
revised, corrected, and much enlarged. 



LIST OF ILLUSTEATIONS 

Facsimile of the Signatures to the Treaty of 

Ghent ........ Frontispiece \ 

FACING PAGE 

"What? You young Yankee-Noodle, strike your own 

FATHER?" 24 ^ 

John Quincy Adams 36 ' 

Robert Southey, Charles Dickens, and Sidney Smith 44 ■- 
James Bryce, William Makepeace Thackeray, and 

Washington Irving 58 ^ 

Woodcutter's Cabin on the Mississippi . . . 62 ^ 

The Solemnity of Justice 64- 

Daniel Webster 74^"^ 

Lord Ashburton 78^' 

Rear-Admiral Charles Wilkes, U. S. N. . . . 90 ■ 

Lord Palmerston 96 ' 

Abraham Lincoln 100 V 

Lord John Russell 108' 

Charles Francis Adams 110 

" The Land of Liberty " 120 "^ 

The Champion Masher of the Universe . . . 130 



Tii 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

The last war between Great Britain and 
the United States began in June, 1812. 
There has been no war between the two 
countries since the treaty of Ghent was 
signed on Christmas eve in 1814. Strictly 
speaking, the absence of war constitutes 
peace, and therefore we may describe these 
hundred years just passed as a century of 
peace between the United States and Great 
Britain. But in the larger and better sense 
of the w6rd it must be confessed that the 
relations between the two countries during 
that period have been at times anything 
but peaceful, and often far from friendly. 
Indeed, there have been some perilous 
moments when war has seemed very im- 
minent. To describe this period therefore 
as one of unbroken good will merely be- 
cause there was no actual fighting would 
be wholly misleading. If a review, how- 



2 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

ever brief, of the relations between Great 
Britain and the United States since 1812 is 
to possess any value, it can only be through 
showing how, by slow steps, with many 
interruptions and much bitterness on both 
sides, we have nevertheless finally attained 
to the genuine friendship in which all sen- 
sible men of both countries rejoice to-day. 
This fortunate condition has been reached 
only after many years of storm and stress, 
which it seems to posterity, always blessed 
with that unerring wisdom which comes after 
the event, might have been easily avoided. 

To understand the present situation 
aright, to comprehend the meaning and 
effects of the war of 1812 and of the ninety- 
eight years of peace which have followed 
its conclusion, it is necessary to begin with 
the separation of the two countries by the 
Treaty of Paris in 1782, when the connec- 
tion between England and the United States 
ceased to be that of mother country and 
colonies and became the more distant rela- 
tion which exists between two independent 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 3 

nations. Just now there appears to be a 
tendency among Englishmen to regard that 
separation of the eighteenth century as a 
small matter, especially so far as their own 
country is concerned, a view which, how- 
ever comfortable, is hardly sustained by 
history, and we may well pause a moment 
at the outset to consider just what the war 
resulting in the treaties of Paris meant, for 
on that decisive event rests ultimately all 
that has since come to pass. 

As an illustration of the attitude of mind 
to which I have referred, let me take the 
recent case of a well-known writer and very 
popular novelist. Some years ago Mr. H. 
G. Wells came to this country, and on his 
return to England, like many of his country- 
men, he wrote a book about the United 
States. Unlike many of his countrymen, 
however, he wrote a very pleasant and 
friendly book, enlivened by some character- 
istic remarks in favor of socialism and of 
converting the Niagara Falls into horse- 
power. He made, however, one comment 



4 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

which struck me at the time, and which, I 
think, has been made since by others of his 
countrymen. This comment was in connec- 
tion with his visit to Boston, as I remember, 
and criticised us good-naturedly for the 
extreme care with which we marked all spots 
connected with the Eevolution, and for the 
apparent importance which we attached to 
that event. Mr. Wells, unlike Sir George 
Trevelyan, the most brilliant of living Eng- 
lish historians, seemed to think that this 
American feeling about the Revolution 
which resulted in the independence of the 
United States was provincial, if not paro- 
chial. In view of the sound system of Brit- 
ish education, which has a great deal to say 
about English victories, great and small, and 
is curiously reticent as to English defeats, 
it is perhaps not surprising that the impor- 
tance attached to the incidents of the Amer- 
ican Eevolution in this country should 
surprise the average traveller from Great 
Britain. But, putting aside the partiality 
which Americans feel toward the Revolution, 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 5 

owing to the fact that they were victorious, 
and the lack of interest with which the 
British regard it, possibly because they were 
defeated, it is perhaps not amiss to point 
out that the war for American independence 
really was an event of high importance, and 
was so considered then, as it has been ever 
since, by dispassionate persons. 

The revolt of the American Colonies in 
1776 agitated the world of that day far 
beyond the parish limits of the United States. 
It divided parties and overthrew Ministries 
in England. It involved France and Spain 
in war with Great Britain, and created the 
armed neutrality of the northern Powers, 
events which are rarely caused by trifling 
or provincial struggles. But the American 
Revolution had results even more momen- 
tous than these. It broke the British 
Empire for the first, and, so far, for the 
only time. It took from England her 
greatest and most valuable possession. 
With the American Colonies she lost a 
population equal to about a fifth of the 



6 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

inhabitants of Great Britain at that period, 
as well as the ownership of the best part of 
a great continent. The independence of the 
Colonies was the foundation of the United 
States, and, whether one approves of the 
United States or not, there can be no ques- 
tion, I think, that they constitute to-day a 
large and important fact in the existing 
world. It was an Englishman, I believe, 
who said that, after all, England's most con- 
siderable achievement was the United States. 
Finally, and this is something which I feel 
it would hardly be possible to describe as 
parochial, modern democracy began with 
the American Kevolution. Carlyle, who 
had more imagination as well as more humor 
than the average British commentator, either 
upon America or upon things in general, 
turns aside from a letter of Friedrich to 
D'Alembert which happened to be dated 
December 16, 1773, in order to give an 
account, a quite inimitable account, of the 
Boston Tea Party which occurred on that 
day. He did so because, to use his own 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 7 

words : " The case is well known and still 
memorable to mankind." It did not seem 
to him parochial, but on the contrary an 
event charged with meaning. With his 
penetrating and wide ranging glance, at 
past and future alike, Carlyle had already 
in one oft quoted sentence set forth what 
the American Eevolution really meant when 
he wrote the history of that greater Revolu- 
tion which came to pass a few years later 
on the other side of the English Channel. 
Here is what he says : " Borne over the 
Atlantic, to the closing ear of Louis, King 
by the Grace of God, what sounds are these ; 
muffled, ominous, new in our centuries'? 
Boston Harbor is black with unexpected 
Tea; behold a Pennsylvania Congress 
gather; and ere long, on Bunker Hill, De- 
mocracy announcing, in rifle volleys death- 
winged, under Star Banner, to the tune 
of Yankee-doodle-do, that she is born and, 
whirlwind-hke, will envelop the whole 
world ! " 

Another great writer of that generation. 



8 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

a friend of Carlyle, read the same prophecy 
in the revolt of the Colonies. With the 
insight of the poet, Emerson declared that 
the shot which the embattled farmers fired 
at Concord Bridge was heard " round the 
world," which, although expressed in verse, 
told the exact truth. At that bridge, in 
that little New England village, the first 
drum-beat of democracy broke upon the 
troubled air, and there the march began. 
The same drum-beat was heard soon after- 
wards in France, where several things 
happened which no one probably would 
regard as provincial, and which caused 
some stir at the time. Looking over 
the world to-day, it may be fairly said 
that no greater event could be commemo- 
rated than the first uprising of democracy 
which later swept over the Governments of 
the nineteenth century, and which is still 
pressing onward, crossing even now into 
the confines of Asia. 

Yet, very characteristically, this American 
Revolution, which Mr. Wells smiles at 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 9 

gently as a little provincial incident, but 
which seems not to have been without its 
effect on the history of civilized man, turned 
on a question of law. That two great 
branches of the same people, speaking the 
same language, holding the same beliefs, 
and cherishing the same institutions, should 
go to war about a question of legal right in 
the imposition of taxes is indeed very typical 
of the race and breed. It is also one reason 
why the war of the Revolution, as a whole, 
was sullied by few acts of cruelty or ferocity, 
for, as Macaulay pointed out long ago, the 
character of a civil war is very largely 
determined by the amount of oppression 
which one side has suffered at the hands of 
the other. The government of the English 
colonies in America had been, on the whole, 
easy and liberal. Sir Robert Walpole, with 
his favorite motto of " Quieta non movere," 
with his wise indifference which allowed the 
dust to gather upon American despatches, 
and the elder Pitt, who had the faculty of 
arousing the enthusiasm of the colonists by 



10 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

appealing to their patriotic impulses and by 
treating them as friends and equals, had 
made the bonds between the mother country 
and her American children very strong. 
But a dull and narrow-minded King, served 
by ministers of slight capacity or of judi- 
ciously pliant natures, soon undid the work 
of the two great statesmen and forced on 
the war which had in it at that moment 
nothing of the inevitable. The Kevolution 
thus generated was fought out through 
seven long years, and the Colonies won. 
There was, of course, bitterness of feeling 
on both sides, but none which could not 
have been quickly and easily overcome, if 
right methods had been pursued. The 
^ Americans, it is true, did not carry out the 

treaty properly in regard to the loyalists, 
and the British, on their side, failed to 
observe it in regard to the relinquishment 
of the western posts which were an absolute 
threat not only to the expansion but to the 
very existence of the United States. One of 
the greatest achievements of Washington's 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 11 

administration was the Jay treaty, and to 
make this settlement with England he sac- 
rificed the French alliance, but he removed 
forever the western menace and cleared the 
frontiers of the United States from a danger 
which in time of war might have proved 
fatal. The French Revolution, which de- 
stroyed the American alliance, divided public 
opinion in the United States, as it did in 
England, and the immediate result was 
virtual, although not declared, war with 
France, a situation that gave England an 
opportunity to bind her former colonies 
closely to her, which unfortunately did not 
seem to English statesmen a thing worth 
doing. 

That the people of England generally 
should think little and know less about 
their former colonies during the closing 
years of the eighteenth century is not sur- 
prising. It was the period of the French 
Revolution, and that terrible convulsion, 
which brought the genius of Burke to the 
confines of madness, unsettled many lesser 



12 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

minds, and through the passions of fear 
and anger seized public attention with such 
an absorbing and relentless grasp that, natu- 
rally, no room was left for thought concerning 
three millions of English speaking people who 
had just set up a national government on the 
other side of the Atlantic. But it is strange 
that English ministers, statesmen charged 
with the responsibility of government in 
a time crowded with perils of every kind, 
should not have paid some attention to 
the United States. They were involved 
in a desperate war with France. Their 
success at sea had been brilliant, but their 
military failures had been little short of 
appalling. They were pouring out millions 
of pounds to pay for coalitions which one 
after the other went to pieces in defeat. 
Their subsidies were almost as completely 
wasted as the huge sums of money which 
went to the Chouans of Brittany, to the 
wretched following of the Comte d'Artois in 
London, or to the conspirators who were 
trying to assassinate the First Consul in 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 13 

Paris. Their allies on the Continent were 
breaking down as the century ended, and 
isolation stared them in the face. One 
would have imagined that under such 
circumstances they would have looked in 
every corner of the globe for new friends 
and new sources of strength. In the 
United States were three millions of people, 
active, enterprising, pushmg their vessels 
into every sea. These people were very 
largely of their own race and despite the 
recent war were still bound to them not 
only by community of language and of 
political belief but by the still stronger ties 
of long existing habits of trade, of com- 
mercial intercourse, and of thought and 
manners. It is true that they grudgingly 
drove a hard bargain with the United 
States in the Jay treaty. But that was 
all. They were content to avoid war 
with their former colonies, and then they 
turned their backs to them, even when 
the policy of France was forcing the 
Americans into their arms. It seems a 



14 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

strange blindness on the part of ministers 
of a great country at such a time as that, 
filled as it was with war and confusion, 
with crumbling governments and falling 
dynasties. No great effort was required, 
had they wished to inform themselves as 
to the United States and to learn that it 
would be profitable to turn them from 
quondam enemies into useful friends and 
allies. It was not difiicult to acquire 
knowledge of the United States. In 1794, 
for instance, Mr. Thomas Cooper, an Eng- 
lishman who had emigrated to America, 
published in the form of letters to a friend 
a book entitled " Some Information Re- 
specting America." The volume did not 
belie its title. It was full of valuable infor- 
mation, and on page 52 occurs this passage : 
" There is little fault to find with the 
government of America, either in principle 
or in practice : we have very few taxes 
to pay, and those are of acknowledged 
necessity, and moderate in amount : we 
have no animosities about reUgion ; it is 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 15 

a subject about which no questions are 
asked : we have few respecting political 
men or political measures : the present 
irritation of men's minds in Great Britain, 
and the discordant state of society on 
political accounts, is not known here. The 
government is the government OF the 
people, and FOR the people. There are 
no tythes nor game laws : and the excise 
laws upon spirits only, and similar to the 
British only in name." 

It is interesting to note that this little 
known writer described the character of 
the government of the United States in 
the exact words of two of the three defi- 
nitions used by Lincoln in his famous 
Speech at Gettysburg. But in this con- 
nection Thomas Cooper's book is of im- 
portance as showing that it was not 
difficult for Englishmen, had they so desired, 
to obtain information about the United 
States. If the book ever came under the 
eyes of any of them, it seems as if the 
inference would have been drawn that a 



16 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

people of whom such things could be 
written deserved, in that great crisis of 
western civilization, both examination and 
consideration. 

But there were other facts of public no- 
toriety not concealed in the books of travel- 
lers which must also have been known to 
the British ministers, but which went by 
them apparently unheeded. They knew 
that the American states, shaken and broken 
by seven years of ci^dl war, after five years 
of a weak central government, ever grow- 
ing more impotent and imbecile, had come 
together and formed a Federal constitution. 
It was a constitution of an unusual charac- 
ter. There was nothing Uke it just then 
extant among men. A century later a 
great English statesman and prime minister 
was to speak of it as the most remarkable 
instrument of government ever struck off 
by a single body of men at one time, and Mr. 
Gladstone was confirmed in this \dew by 
Lord Acton, who wrote in his " History of 
Freedom " : 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 17 

" American independence was the begin- 
ning of a new era, not merely as a re^'ival 
of the Revolution, but because no other 
revolution ever proceeded from so slight a 
cause or was ever conducted with so much 
moderation. The Eiu'opean monarchies 
supported it. The gTeatest statesmen in 
England averred that it was just. It estab- 
lished a pure democracy, but it was democ- 
racy m its highest perfection, armed and 
^'io;ilant, less ag^ainst aristocracv and mon- 
archy than against its own weakness and 
excess. Whilst Eno-land was admired for 
the safeguards with which, in the course of 
many centimes, it had fortified Hberty 
against the power of the crown, America 
appeared still more worthy of adnihation 
for the safeguards which, in the dehberations 
of a single memorable year, it had set up 
against the power of its own sovereign peo- 
ple. It resembled no other known democ- 
racy, for it respected freedom, authority, and 
law. It resembled no other constitution, for 
it was contained in half a dozen inteUioible 

c 



18 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

articles. Ancient Europe opened its mind to 
two new ideas — that revolution with very 
little provocation may be just, and that 
democracy in very large dimensions may be 
safe." 

To criticise Pitt and his colleagues 
because they did not look at the constitu- 
tion of the United States then just born into 
the world with the eyes of posterity or with 
the insight and comprehension of the great- 
est historical scholar in England a century 
afterwards would of course be most unjust. 
Yet it would seem not unreasonable to ex- 
pect from responsible and able ministers, 
certainly from a man of such commanding 
intellect as the younger Pitt, some slight 
perception of the meaning of the American 
Revolution and of the remarkable qualities 
of the constitution of the United States 
pointed out with such terseness and force 
by Lord Acton. Had they given any at- 
tention to the subject, they must have seen 
that in this new constitution and its first ten 
amendments were embodied all those great 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 19 

principles of individual rights and ordered 
liberty for which Englishmen had fought for 
centuries. They must have perceived with 
but trifling intellectual effort that this new 
government was organized and marching 
forwards, that the Americans had provided 
for the payment of all public debts with 
scrupulous honesty, that their revenue 
was growing, and that the administration of 
Washington, of whom they had certainly 
heard, was strong and courageous and had 
not hesitated to resist revolutionary France 
or to assert complete neutrality. If they 
had considered these facts, one would have 
supposed that in their own condition, en- 
gaged as they were in a desperate war, they 
would have decided that the friendship of 
this new nation was worth consideration and 
cultivation. But the thought apparently 
never occurred to them, and they passed the 
United States by as unworthy of attention 
and deserving only of contemptuous and ig- 
norant indifference. Then came the great 
struggle with Napoleon, and again England 



20 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

might easily have made her former colonies 
her close friends and allies. This policy in- 
deed was so obvious that it is hard to under- 
stand why even English ministers failed to 
adopt it. Jefferson, with all his eulogy of 
France and denunciation of England for polit- 
ical purposes, was more than ready to unite 
with her against Napoleon if England 
would only have allowed him to do so, but 
after the death of the younger Pitt and the 
dissolution of the Ministry of " All the 
Talents," the English Government fell once 
more into the hands of very inferior men. 
Ministers of the caliber of Perceval, Castle- 
reagh, and Lord Liverpool, united with ex- 
treme Tories like Lord Eldon, whose ability 
was crippled by their blind prejudices, were 
utterly unable to see the value of friendship 
with the United States and preferred to treat 
their former colonists with a comfortable 
contempt. The one very clever man not in 
opposition in those days was Canning, and 
he did more than any one else, perhaps, by 
his unfortunate attitude to drive the United 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 21 

States away from England. It was he who 
said that the navy of the United States con- 
sisted of '' a few fir frigates with a bit of 
bunting at the top." For the sake of this 
not very humorous aUiteration he paid rather 
heavily in the loss of a good many English 
frigates at a later day. Disraeli says in 
" Sybil " that from the death of the younger 
Pitt to 1825 " the political history of England 
is a history of great events and little men," 
a description of the period as terse as it was 
truthful, if we except the Duke of Welling- 
ton. The combmation was not beneficial to 
England and was unfortunate for her rela- 
tions with the United States. 

It is not pleasant to Americans to recall 
the years which preceded our second war 
with England. There was no indignity, no 
humiliation, no outrage, that England on 
the one side and Napoleon on the other 
did not inflict upon the United .States. 
Our Government submitted and yielded 
and made sacrifices which it is now difficult 
to contemplate with calmness, until at last 



22 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

a party arose composed of young men 
who were profoundly convinced that any- 
thing was better than such conditions, and 
that if we were to enjoy a national exist- 
ence worth having we must fight. They 
did not care very much with whom we 
fought, but they were determined to fight 
some one in order to vindicate the right 
of the United States to live as a nation 
without dishonor. The unscrupulous dex- 
terity of Napoleon and the marvellous stu- 
pidity of England resulted in our fighting 
England instead of France, and thus we 
came to the war of 1812. 

We had no army and a very small navy. 
The political group which had forced war 
upon us, although right in their reasons 
for going to war, were utterly wrong in 
the ignorant boasts with which they pro- 
claimed our readiness for battle. Wholly 
unprepared, we suffered many defeats on 
the Canadian frontier, which were redeemed 
only by the two battles of Lundy's Lane 
and Chippewa. Upon the seas and lakes 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 23 

we had almost unbroken victory, and, 
finally at New Orleans, after peace had 
really been made, but before it was known, 
Jackson defeated the veterans of Welling- 
ton's Peninsula campaigns with a thorough- 
ness and a severity which were so marked 
that the battle is hardly alluded to in 
British histories, and must therefore be 
relegated to the provincial class of histori- 
cal events. Thus the war came to an end 
before it had lasted three years, and when 
the Treaty of Ghent was signed that instru- 
ment did not in plain words dispose of a 
single one of the questions which had made 
the war unavoidable and upon which the 
United States had fought. Yet, none the 
less, the war had settled all those questions. 
Never again did England attempt to stop 
an American man-of-war or an American 
merchantman on the high seas and take 
seamen, whom she claimed as deserters, 
from their decks. Never again did she at- 
tempt to interfere with American commerce. 
Whatever losses the United States might 



24 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

have suffered in the war, however much 
her pride might have been wounded by the 
destruction of the Capitol at Washington, 
the real victory was with the Americans. 
They had fought, and they had gained 
what they fought for. They sacrificed 
nothing — not an inch of territory — by so 
doing. The only losses suffered by the 
United States were in men and money, 
and by those losses we had put an end 
forever to the humiliating treatment which 
had been meted out to us during the 
first decade of the century. As the years 
passed by, all this became apparent, and 
it is now perfectly plain that the war of 
1812 achieved the result for which it was 
fought, by establishing the position of the 
United States as an independent nation 
and restoring the national self-respect. 
Although the treaty of Ghent did not 
show it, we have but to look behind the 
curtain which the hand of time has drawn 
aside in order to learn that the men of that 
day in England recognized what had hap- 




"what? you young YANKEE-NOODLE, STRIKE YOUR OWN 
FATHER? " 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 25 

pened, although they might not admit it 
to themselves, much less to the public. 
They confessed the truth in many ways, 
none the less clearly because the confession 
was indirect. 

Take, for example, this letter from Mr. 
James, the naval historian, to Mr. Canning : 

Mr. W. James to Mr. Canning 
« Perry Vale, Near Sydenham, Kent : Jany, 9, 1827. 

" The menacing tone of the American 
President's message is now the prevail- 
ing topic of conversation, more especially 
among the mercantile men in whose com- 
pany I daily travel to and from town. 
One says ' We had better cede a point or 
two rather than go to War with the 
United States.' *Yes,' says another, 'for 
we shall get nothing but hard knocks 
there.' ' True,' adds a third, ' and what is 
worse than all, our seamen are half afraid 
to meet the Americans at sea.' Unfor- 
tunately this depression of feeling, this 
cowed spirit, prevails very generally over 



26 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

the community, even among persons well 
informed on other subjects, and who, were 
a British seaman to be named with a 
Frenchman or Spaniard, would scoff at the 
comparison." ^ 

The words of Mr James show the effect 
upon the public mind in England of the 
American naval victories, which so pro- 
foundly interested Napoleon. They pene- 
trated so deeply that they actually reached 
the intelligence of the Liverpools and the 
Castlereaghs. Even they felt the meaning 
to England's prestige as a naval power of 
losing eleven out of thirteen single ship 
actions and two flotilla engagements on the 
Great Lakes. Their alarm can be meas- 
ured by the honors they conferred on Cap- 
tain Broke, who commanded the Shannon 
when she defeated the Chesapeake — higher 
honors than Nelson received for his brilliant 
service in the battle of Cape St. Vincent. 
Nor was this all. Despite their contempt 

* " Canning Correspondence." Edited by E. J. Stapleton. 
Vol. II, p. 340. 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 27 

for the Americans and their loud assertions 
of satisfaction with their successes, as the 
war drew to its close the ministers be- 
came so uneasy that they proposed to 
send Wellington to America to command 
their armies on the very scene of the 
victories which they so loudly proclaimed. 
The Duke's letters in regard to this pro- 
posal are most instructive, and reveal the 
real results of the war, for Wellington was 
never the victim of illusions. He had in 
high degree the great faculty of looking 
facts in the face. 

On the 9th of November, 1814, he wrote 
from Paris to Lord Liverpool as follows : 

" I have already told you and Lord 
Bathurst that I feel no objection to going 
to America, though I don't promise to 
myself much success there. I believe there 
are troops enough there for the defence of 
Canada forever, and even for the accom- 
plishment of any reasonable offensive plan 
that could be formed from the Canadian 
frontier. I am quite sure that all the 



28 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

American armies of which I have ever 
read would not beat out of a field of battle 
the troops that went from Bordeaux last 
summer, if common precautions and care 
were taken of them. 

'' That which appears to me to be want- 
ing in America is not a General, or General 
officers and troops, but a naval superiority 
on the Lakes. Till that superiority is ac- 
quired, it is impossible, according to my 
notion, to maintain an army in such a 
situation as to keep the enemy out of the 
whole frontier, much less to make any 
conquest from the enemy, which, with 
those superior means, might, with reason- 
able hopes of success, be undertaken. I 
may be wrong in this opinion, but I think 
the whole history of the war proves its 
truth ; and I suspect that you will find 
that Prevost will justify his misfortunes, 
which, by the by, I am quite certain are 
not what the Americans represented them 
to be, by stating that the navy were de- 
feated, and even if he had taken Fort 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 29 

Mason he must have retired. The ques- y 
tion is, whether we can acquire this naval 
superiority on the Lakes. If we can't, I 
shall do you but little good in America ; 
and I shall go there only to prove the truth 
of Prevost's defence, and to sign a peace 
which might as well be signed now. There 
will always, however, remain this advan- 
tage, that the confidence which I have ac- 
quired will reconcile both the army and 
people in England to terms of which they 
would not now approve. 

*' In regard to your present negotia- 
tions, I confess that I think you have no 
right from the state of the war to de- 
mand any concession of territory from 
America. Considering everything, it is my 
opinion that the war has been a most 
successful one, and highly honorable to 
the British arms ; but from particular cir- 
cumstances, such as the want of the naval 
superiority on the Lakes, you have not 
been able to carry it into the enemy's 
territory, notwithstanding your military 



30 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

success, and now undoubted military su- 
periority, and have not even cleared your 
own territory of the enemy on the point 
of attack. You cannot, then, on any prin- 
ciple of equality in negotiation, claim a 
cession of territory excepting in exchange 
for other advantages which you have in 
your power. 

" I put out of the question the possession 
taken by Sir John Sherbrooke between the 
Penobscot and Passamaquoddy Bay. It is 
evidently only temporary, and till a larger 
force will drive away the few companies he 
has left there ; and an officer might as well 
claim the sovereignty of the ground on 
which his piquets stand, or over which his 
patrols pass. 

" Then if this reasoning be true, why 
stipulate for the uti possidetis? You can 
get no territory ; indeed the state of your 
military operations, however creditable, does 
not entitle you to demand any ; and you 
only afford the Americans a popular and 
creditable ground which, I believe, their 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 31 

Government are looking for, not to break 
off the negotiations, but to avoid to make 
peace. If you had territory, as I hope you 
soon will have New Orleans, I should prefer 
to insist upon the cession of that province 
as a separate article than upon the uti pos- 
sidetis as a principle of negotiation. 

And again, on November 18, 1814, he 
wrote to Lord Liverpool : 

'' I have already told you that I have no 
objection to going to America, and I will go 
whenever I may be ordered. But does it 
not occur to your Lordship that, by appoint- 
ing me to go to America at this moment, 
you give ground for belief all over Europe 
that your affairs there are in a much worse 
situation than they really are ? And will 
not my nomination at this moment be a 
triumph to the Americans and their friends 
here and elsewhere ? It will give satisfac- 
tion, and that only momentary, in England ; 
and it may have the effect of raising hopes 
and expectations there which, we know, can- 
not be realized." 



32 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

Despite the " military successes," Welling- 
ton did not think that England could make 
any demand for territory or compensation, 
which shows that the '^ successes " had been 
as barren as they were trivial. The invin- 
cible troops from Bordeaux were badly 
beaten by Jackson, and Pakenham, one of 
Wellington's favorite generals, was killed, 
so that he did not capture New Orleans, as 
the Duke had anticipated. 

The result was a treaty of peace that on 
its face only brought peace, which the Duke 
evidently thought was all England could 
expect. The pity of it all was that there need 
not have been any war between England 
and the United States in 1812, if England 
had only seen fit to make the United States 
a friend instead of a foe. But England did 
not so will, and the war at least taught her 
that the United States could no longer be 
bullied and outraged with impunity. Thus 
the war of 1812 brought, after all, a peace 
worth having, and laid the foundations for 
that larger peace which has lasted for a 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 33 

hundred years. During that time, through 
many vicissitudes, the relations of the two 
countries have so improved that we are now 
warranted in believing, what all reflecting \^ 
men earnestly hope, that another war be- 
tween England and the United States has 
become an impossibility. 

These larger results of the war, so plainly 
to be seen now, were not of course immedi- 
ately apparent. The old attitude was still 
too fixed, the old habits still too strong, to 
be abandoned in a moment. We made a 
brief treaty of commerce and navigation with 
England in June, 1815, six months after the 
conclusion of the treaty of Ghent, but this 
second treaty disposed of none of the out- 
standing questions as to which the treaty 
of Ghent had been silent, and some of these 
thus passed over were of a nature which 
imperatively required settlement. A British 
officer, unconscious apparently that a war 
had been fought, even undertook to search 
some of our vessels upon the Great Lakes, 
a little eccentricity which was not repeated. 



34 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

Despite the agreement of the Ghent treaty, 
England held on to Astoria and the posts in 
the extreme Northwest, and, what was still 
worse, she also attempted to take the ground 
that our fishing rights, determined by the 
treaty of 1783, had been extinguished by 
the war. Acting on this opmion, British 
cruisers seized American fishing vessels, and 
the condition of affairs on the coasts of 
Nova Scotia, Canada, and Newfoundland 
became serious in the extreme. Mr. Adams, 
then Minister of the United States in Lon- 
don, brought these questions to the atten- 
tion of Lord Castlereagh, urging upon him 
the necessity of further treaties to settle 
these disputes, to extend the commercial 
convention of 1815, and to make some 
agreement in regard to the slaves who had 
been carried off* after the conclusion of the 
war, as well as with reference to the disputed 
northwestern boundary. His discussions 
with Lord Castlereagh, which are detailed 
at length in his diary, were fruitless, and the 
British Cabinet declined at that time to 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 35 

enter upon further negotiations. It may be 
inferred that although somewhat disturbed 
by the events of the war of 1812 they still 
did not think it worth while to take any 
steps toward improving their relations with 
the American people. 

Soon after these conferences with Lord 
Castlereagh Mr. Adams returned to the 
United States in order to take his place in 
President Monroe's Cabinet on the 4th of 
March, 1817, and Mr. Eush succeeded him 
as Minister at London. Once more an 
effort to come to a further agreement on 
some, at least, of the outstanding questions 
was made, and Mr. Eush was instructed 
that if England would assent to a confer- 
ence, Mr. Gallatin, who was our Minister at 
Paris, would be joined with him in the 
negotiations. Then it was that the effects 
of the war began to be really apparent. 
The exasperation caused by the seizure of 
our fishing vessels and by the refusal to 
carry out the provisions of the treaty of 
Ghent on the northwest coast made it evi- 



/ 



36 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

dent that if something was not done the two 
countries would again be involved in hostil- 
ities. This danger, which would have made 
no impression upon the minds of British 
ministers ten years earlier, was now effective, 
and England's action showed that when it 
came to the point she was no longer ready 
to go to extremes. The Ministry changed 
its attitude and assented to a new negotia- 
tion. The result was the treaty of 1818, 
by which England admitted in principle the 
American contention that the fishing rights 
conceded in 1783 were final in their nature 
and could not be abrogated by war. Mr. 
Rush and Mr. Gallatin, moreover, succeeded 
in obtaining larger concessions in this respect 
than their instructions called for, and the 
American fishing rights within the three- 
mile limit, and also the right to dry and 
cure on the coast, were recognized as to cer- 
tain portions of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, 
and Canada. The treaty also disposed of 
the boundary from the Lake of the Woods 
to the Rocky Mountains, while from the 




JOHN QUINCY ADAMS 
(From the portrait by Copley) 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 37 

mountains westward to the ocean the country 
was left open to the occupation of the sub- 
jects and citizens of both Powers for a term 
of ten years. The commercial convention 
was extended, and provision was made for 
the settlement of American claims on account 
of the slaves, who had been carried away, 
by referring the whole matter to the decision 
of some friendly sovereign. Nothing was 
said about the subject of seamen's rights, \/ 
which had been so largely the cause of the 
war. The treaty of 1818 was as silent on 
this topic as the treaty of Ghent, but this 
question had in reality been settled by the 
war itself, for England, having found that 
the theme was one upon which the United 
States was always ready to fight, quietly 
allowed her claims in this direction to die 
away. 

Four years after the treaty of 1818, and in 
accordance with the fifth article, the question 
of compensation for slaves or other property 
carried away after the war was referred to 
the Emperor of Eussia, as arbitrator, and 



38 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

the Emperor's award decided that the United 
States was entitled to just indemnification 
for all such private property taken by the 
British forces, and more especially for all 
such slaves as were carried away from the 
places and territories for the restitution of 
which the treaty stipulated. The adoption 
of the treaty of 1818 was also the signal for 
the restoration to the United States of Astoria 
and the other points on the coast of the ex- 
treme Northwest. In this way the treaty 
of 1818, and the award of the Emperor of 
Eussia, which grew out of it, brought the re- 
lations of the two countries into a better con- 
dition than they had enjoyed since the close 
of the American Revolution, and these trea- 
ties may be said to have constituted the first 
step toward the improvement of those rela- 
tions which were destined to grow better, al- 
though with many checks and hindrances, 
for one hundred years to come. 

The two countries were also drawn nearer 
together by holding the same attitude in re- 
gard to the revolting colonies of Spain in 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 39 

South America, and by their common dislike 
and distrust of the principles of the Holy 
Alliance. When Canning broke away from 
the somewhat musty Toryism which thought 
everything was to go on just as of old, and 
as if the French Revolution had never hap- 
pened, he not only powerfully aided the 
South American republics, but he greatly 
strengthened the position of the United 
States. Canning did not at all approve 
the extended form which his policy took on 
in the Monroe Doctrine, but his work could 
not be undone, and a common sympathy 
and a common policy in the South American 
struggle for freedom drew Great Britain and 
the United States closely together in the 
eyes of the world, and, also, although to a 
less degree, in their own estimation. 

After the award of the Emperor in regard 
to indemnity for the slaves carried off by the 
British forces in the war of 1812, there was, 
with the exception of the conventions of 
1827, renewing and extending the treaty of 
1818 and providing for an arbitration of the 



40 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

disputed northeastern boundary, no interna- 
tional transaction involving serious differ- 
ences, and no treaty between the two Gov- 
ernments of Great Britain and the United 
States, for twenty years. The marked effect 
which the war of 1812, as I have pointed 
out, had produced upon the attitude of Eng- 
land toward the United States was, however, 
very largely confined to the intercourse of 
the two Governments. That intercourse 
had become what, in diplomatic parlance, is 
termed ''correct," and the old tone, so famil- 
iar in British despatches before the war of 
1812, when the Ministry treated the United 
States as if it were a collection of African 
tribes and therefore not entitled to the ordi- 
nary good manners of international relations, 
wholly disappeared. Officially we had 
forced our way into the family of nations, 
and had secured the customary courtesies 
which international intercourse demands. 
Yet this improvement, which was of the first 
v/ importance, did not go very far toward alter- 
ing the feeling which existed among the 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 41 

peoples of the two countries toward each 
other. Our relations with Great Britain 
after the treaty of 1818 entered upon an- 
other phase quite outside the scope of gov- 
ernmental action, which in its result did more 
lasting harm to the cause of genuine friend- 
ship between the two nations than all the 
best efforts of diplomatists or public men on 
either side could remedy or undo. 

Prior to the war of 1812 many books and 
much writing in reviews and newspapers ap- 
peared in England which treated of the 
United States in the most unfavorable man- 
ner, and in a spirit which at times might 
fairly be called malignant. This systematic 
defamation was carried on so generally and 
so persistently that it gave rise to a fixed 
belief in the United States not only that it 
was part of a deliberate plan, but that some 
of the writers, like Moore, Ashe, and Parkin- 
son, were actually in the pay of the British 
Government, and that they wrote for the 
purpose of inflaming Enghsh hostility tow- 
ard everything American, and of preventing 



42 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

emigration to England's former colonies. 
During those early years of the century the 
people of the United States seem to have 
had the good sense to treat these criticisms 
with indifference ; and when the controversy 
between the countries culminated in war, 
printed attacks fell, in the presence of real 
fighting, unnoticed from the press. After 
the war, however, and after the settlement 
of the commercial relations of the two coun- 
tries by the treaty of 1818, the habit of de- 
preciating and libelling the United States, 
either in books or in more ephemeral publi- 
cations, entered upon a new phase. Any 
one who will take the trouble to examine 
what was written in England about the 
United States during the period from 1820 
to 1850 will find it difficult to avoid the be- 
hef that the assaults upon the American 
people were systematic in their nature. 
Those who are curious in such matters can 
find an excellent summary in Mr. McMas- 
ter's history, where the English comments 
upon the United States from 1820 to 1840 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 43 

are vividly described. It seems almost in- 
credible that such things could have been said 
and written by one ostensibly friendly people 
about another people who spoke the same 
language and inherited the same political 
traditions. There were, without doubt, 
many things in the United States of that 
day which were open to just and severe crit- 
icism. No successful defence, for example, 
could be entered before the tribunal of the 
civilized world in behalf of negro slavery. 
But the English critics did not confine them- 
selves to that which was deserving of criti- 
cism. Everything in the United States was 
to them anathema. The great reviews gave 
many pages to depicting what the United 
States was as they beheld and interpreted it. 
Robert Southey in the "Quarterly," and Syd- 
ney Smith in the ''Edinburgh," were only two 
of the most distinguished among the many 
writers great and small who devoted them- 
selves not merely to criticising but to slander- 
ing the United States. They were not 
ashamed to effect their purpose by telling 



44 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

the most absolute falsehoods, and the lengths 
to which they went seem now well-nigh 
incredible. The men of America were said 
to be '' turbulent citizens, abandoned Chris- 
tians, inconstant husbands, unnatural fathers, 
and treacherous friends." The men who 
had whipped English vessels in eleven single 
ship fights out of thirteen were accused 
of having run away shamefully when they 
could not fight to advantage. As they 
generally fought to advantage at sea, they 
had not often run away. " In the Southern 
parts of the Union," says another calm 
thinker and judicious critic, " the rites of 
our holy faith are almost never practised ; 
one-third of the people have no church at 
all. The religious principle is gaining 
ground in the northern parts of the Union. 
It is becoming fashionable among the better 
orders of society to go to church." It is 
interesting to consider this picture of church- 
going becoming fashionable among the 
descendants of the Puritans, but the writers 
had forgotten, probably, that New England 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 45 

was settled when it was a wilderness by 
people who went there, as Carlyle puts it, 
because they wanted to hear a sermon 
preached in their own way. " The supreme 
felicity of a true-born American is inaction 
of body and inanity of mind," is another 
description of the people of the United 
States, and the reproach of inactivity is one 
of the most comic ever addressed to Ameri- 
cans even at that time. Then, of course, 
the British critics had a great deal to say 
about our total lack of literature and the 
entire absence among us of any men of dis- 
tinction. Franklin, we were informed, had 
elicited some useful discoveries, but that 
was because he had lived in England for 
some time. It might be suggested that 
there were many other persons dwelling in 
England whose residence in that favored 
island had failed to make them capable of 
eliciting Franklin's useful discoveries. It 
was also predicted that he would not be 
remembered for fifty years. Prophecies of 
fame are always perilous, and it is to be 



46 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

feared that Franklin is a good deal better 
remembered to-day than Sydney Smith or 
Southey — the most considerable of our 
critics in those days — and more read, too, 
if we may judge from the fact that every 
civilized nation not long since sent eminent 
representatives to Philadelphia to celebrate 
the two hundredth anniversary of his birth, 
a ceremony which seems to have been 
omitted in the case of Southey and Sydney 
Smith when a century had elapsed after 
their coming into the world. Eobert Fulton, 
it was asserted, stole his invention from see- 
ing the sailing ships which ran on the Clyde 
with steam-power in 1787, although no 
mention is made elsewhere of the persons 
who performed that feat, which does not 
seem to have travelled beyond the Clyde, 
and which is just as veracious as the state- 
ment, also made at that time, that Fulton 
was born in Paisley in Scotland, when in 
reality he had the misfortune to be bom in 
Pennsylvania. 

It is pleasant to think and it is only fair to 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 47 

remember that at the very time when this 
raihng against Americans was at its height, 
a man of genius, one of the great minds of 
England in those days, saw the injustice and 
folly of all this abuse and could speak of the 
American people not only temperately but 
kindly. Coleridge in his familiar talk refers 
to the United States and its people in this 
way: 

" I deeply regret the anti- American arti- 
cles of some of the leading reviews. The 
Americans regard what is said of them in 
England a thousand times more than they 
do anything said of them in any other 
country. The Americans are excessively 
pleased with any kind or favourable ex- 
pressions, and never forgive or forget 
any slight or abuse. It would be better 
for them if they were a trifle thicker- 
skinned." . . . 

" The last American war was to us only 
something to talk or read about ; but to 
the Americans it was the cause of misery 
in their own homes." . . . 



48 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

" I, for one, do not call the sod under my 
feet my country. But language, religion, 
laws, government, blood, — identity of these 
makes men of one country." ^ 

And again on April 10, 1833, he said: 
" The possible destiny of the United 
States of America, — as a nation of a hun- 
dred millions of freemen, — stretching from 
the Atlantic to the Pacific, living under the 
laws of Alfred, and speaking the language 
of Shakespeare and Milton, is an august 
conception. Why should we not wish to 
see it realized ? America would then be 
England viewed through a solar microscope : 
Great Britain in a state of glorious magni- 
fication! How deeply to be lamented is 
the spirit of hostility and sneering which 
some of the popular books of travels have 
shown in treating of the Americans ! They 
hate us, no doubt, just as brothers hate ; 
but they respect the opinion of an English- 
man concerning themselves ten times as 
much as that of a native of any other coun- 

1 Table Talk, May 28, 1830, " The Americans." 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 49 

try on earth. A very little humouring 
of their prejudices, and some courtesy of 
language and demeanour on the part of 
Englishmen, would work wonders, even 
as it is, with the public mind of the 
Americans." . . . 

'' Captain Basil Hall's book is certainly 
very entertaining and instructive but, in my 
judgment, his sentiments upon many points, 
and more especially his mode of expression, 
are unwise and uncharitable. After all, are 
not most of the things shown up with so 
much bitterness by him merely national 
foibles, parallels to which every people has 
and must of necessity have 1 " ^ 

One feels disposed to say to-day that the 
slander and vilification by Sydney Smith 
and Southey, and by the pack of unknown 
writers who followed their example, is more 
than compensated by the kind, wise words 
of Coleridge, especially as Coleridge is still 
read and remembered, while the others, 
with the exception of Sydney Smith, are 

1 " Table Talk." 



50 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

quite forgotten and their books and articles 
are to the world at large as unknown as if 
they had never existed. But at the time 
the words of those who defamed were 
printed and read, while Coleridge's talk was 
still mipublished. 

These few passages which I have quoted 
from the Reviews give, however, a very faint 
impression of Enghsh criticism upon America 
at that time, although such stuff is hardly 
to be dignified by the name of criticism. It 
was in reality childish and rather ignorant 
abuse. But now, contrary to what had 
happened in the earlier years, the Ameri- 
cans, unfortunately, were roused into tak- 
ing it up and making elaborate replies. 
They had not much difficulty in con- 
troverting the false statements and misrep- 
resentations so freely made, but they did 
not stop there. They naturally availed 
themselves of the tu quoque argument, and 
it was not at all difficult in the history 
of England to find facts which, with ap- 
propriate twists and bendings, made the 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 51 

English people appear in a very unenviable 
light. 

This warfare of books and magazine arti- 
cles continued and was much emphasized 
and embittered when it was waged on a large 
scale by popular writers like Mrs. TroUope 
and Captain Hall. Everything else, how- 
ever, sank into insignificance compared to 
the effect of one book, much more temperate 
than any of the others, but written by a 
great genius who saw fit later to sharpen 
what he had said in a book of travels by 
carrying his animosity into the realms of 
fiction. Charles Dickens came to the United 
States in 1841. He was received with an 
outburst of affectionate and admiring en- 
thusiasm which has rarely been seen any- 
where in the case of a man of letters. He 
went home and wrote a book about us 
called " American Notes," and then he im- 
mortalized certain types of American char- 
acter in "Martin Chuzzlewit." He said a 
great deal that was very true and entirely 
deserved. The characters of the novel 



52 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

were unfortunately in many respects only 
too real, and, deeply angered as we were 
at the time, it may be safely said that 
Elijah Pogram and Jefferson Brick and 
Hannibal ChoUop, General Choke and Mrs. 
Hominy have an immortality more assured 
among the American people than anywhere 
else, for the anger has long since died away, 
while the truth of the satire and the comi- 
cality of those beings created by the magic 
touch of genius still remain. But at the 
time the resentment was intense. How in- 
tense the feeling was we can see from the 
following entry made by Emerson in his 
journal on November 25 (1842). 

" Yesterday I read Dickens' * American 
Notes.' It answers its end very well, 
which plainly was to make a readable book, 
nothing more. Truth is not his object 
for a single instant, but merely to make 
good points in a lively sequence, and he 
proceeds very well. As an account of 
America it is not to be considered for a 
moment : it is too short, and too narrow, 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 53 

too superficial, and too ignorant, too slight, 
and too fabulous, and the man totally un- 
equal to the work. A very lively rattle on 
that nuisance, a sea voyage, is the first 
chapter ; and a pretty fair example of the 
historical truth of the whole book. We can 
hear throughout every page the dialogue 
between the author and his publisher, — 
'Mr. Dickens, the book must be entertain- 
ing — that is the essential point. Truth? 
Damn truth ! I tell you, it must be enter- 
taining.' As a picture of American man- 
ners nothing could be falser. No such con- 
versations ever occur in this country in 
real life, as he relates. He has picked up 
and noted with eagerness each odd local 
phrase that he met with, and, when he had 
a story to relate, has joined them together, 
so that the result is the broadest caricature; 
and the scene might as truly have been laid 
in Wales or in England as in the States. 
Monstrous exaggeration is an easy secret of 
romance. But Americans who, like some 
of us Massachusetts people, are not fond 



54 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

of spitting, will go from Maine to New 
Orleans, and meet no more annoyances than 
we should in Britain or France. So with 
*yes,' so with 'fixings,' so with soap and 
towels ; and all the other trivialities which 
this trifler detected in travelling over half 
the world. The book makes but a poor 
apology for its author, who certainly ap- 
pears in no dignified or enviable position." ^ 
Emerson was not only a great man and 
a man of genius but he had one of the cool- 
est, calmest, and best-balanced minds con- 
ceivable. Yet he could write in this fashion 
of the ''American Notes." If Emerson felt 
in this way, and of course there is much truth 
in what he says, we can imagine the feelings 
of the average American about Dickens at 
that moment. Whether what was said in 
the " Notes " or in " Martin Chuzzlewit " at a 
later day was just or unjust, true or untrue, 
there was a widespread feeling in the United 
States that, whoever else might find fault 
with and ridicule us, Charles Dickens, after 

1 Emerson's Journals, 1841-1844, pp. 312-313. 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 55 

the reception which had been given him, 
was debarred by every rule of loyalty and 
good manners from doing so. That this 
feeling was natural and that the rule was 
one which could be both accepted and ob- 
served was made visible to all men not long 
after the visit of Dickens. 

A few years later another great English 
novelist came to the United States; came 
twice, in fact, and delivered lectures. No 
doubt, with his keen and penetrating obser- 
vation, he perceived many things which 
lent themselves to criticism, to ridicule, and 
to satire, of which no living writer was more 
capable than he. He was by temperament 
very sensitive to just those shortcomings 
which are common and repellent in a crude 
and unformed society. He was urged in 
every way and tempted with the promise of 
great profits to write a book about America, 
but he declined. He had been cordially re- 
ceived in the United States; he had Hved 
in our houses ; he had accepted our hospi- 
tality ; only kindness had been shown him. 



56 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

Others might write what they pleased about 
America, but he would not. Let me recall 
what he himself said in a " Eoundabout " 
paper : 

" Yonder drawing was made in a country 
where there was such hospitality, friendship, 
kindness, shown to the humble designer that 
his eyes do not care to look for faults or his 
pen to note them. . . . How hospitable 
they were, those Southern men ! In the 
North itself the welcome was not kinder, as 
I, who had eaten Northern and Southern 
salt, can testify ! " 

How kind and generous it all is, and how 
pleasant it is now, to every one who loves 
the memory of the genius that created Becky 
Sharp and drew the character of Colonel 
Newcome, to know that he was, above all 
things, loyal and true. We had on our own 
side, too, a distinguished man of letters 
whose conception of his duty toward the 
two nations who read his books was to cher- 
ish friendship and kindliness and not to seek 
for faults and embitter feelings. Let me de- 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 57 

scribe him in Thackeray's words, for they 
both thought alike in this great matter which 
involves nothing less than good-will among 
men : 

*'Two men, famous, admired, beloved, 
have just left us, the Goldsmith and Gibbon 
of our time. . . . One was the first Ambas- 
sador whom the New World of Letters sent 
to the Old. He was born almost with the 
republic ; the pater patrioe had laid his hand 
on the child's head. He bore Washington's 
name ; he came amongst us bringing the 
kindest sympathy, the most artless, smiling 
good-will. His new country (which some 
people here might be disposed to regard 
rather superciliously) could send us, as he 
showed in his own person, a gentleman who, 
though himself born in no very high sphere, 
was most finished, polished, easy, witty, 
quiet ; and, socially, the equal of the most 
refined Europeans. If Irving's welcome in 
England was a kind one, was it not also 
gratefully remembered 1 If he ate our salt, 
did he not pay us with a thankful heart ? 



58 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

Who can calculate the amount of friendliness 
and good feeling for our country which this 
writer's generous and untiring regard for us 
disseminated in his own 1 His books are 
read by millions of his countrymen ; whom 
he has taught to love England, and why to 
love her. It would have been easy to speak 
otherwise than he did ; to inflame national 
rancors, which, at the time when he first be- 
came known as a public writer, war had just 
renewed ; to cry down the old civilization at 
the expense of the new ; to point out our 
faults, arrogance, shortcomings, and give the 
republic to infer how much she was the 
parent state's superior. There are writers 
enough in the United States, honest and 
otherwise, to preach that kind of doctrine. 
But the good Irving, the peaceful, the 
friendly, had no place for bitterness in his 
heart, and no scheme but kindness." 

Unfortunately, the example of Irving and 
Thackeray had but few imitators. Every- 
thing which these two said and wrote or 
omitted to say and write was forgotten in 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 59 

the clash of men who took a precisely op- 
posite course, to the great detriment of all 
concerned, and the bitterness was concen- 
trated aromid the " American Notes " and 
their author, whom the American people 
had loved and honored and taken to their 
hearts. It was this feeling that the man 
whom they had admired and cheered and 
feasted had been disloyal which made Dick- 
ens's criticism and ridicule rankle more than 
that of all others. But if we leave the per- 
sonal equation aside, Dickens was only the 
culmination of the general commentary which 
England then made and apparently thought 
it well to make upon the United States. 
Both people spoke and read the same lan- 
guage. In those days they were still closely 
akin. We read English books, copied 
English fashions, and looked up to English 
standards in society and in literature, and 
therefore all that was said in England of the 
kind which has just been indicated went 
home and made Americans very angry and 
very sore. We were a new people, or rather 



60 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

we were the offspring of an old people settled 
in a new country, and we were young, very 
self-conscious, very sensitive, and we felt at- 
tacks which would be no more noticed to-day 
than the rattle of a dead autumn leaf flutter- 
ing before the wind. We replied to the 
criticisms in a savage and intemperate man- 
ner. Sometimes we wounded ; generally 
we produced no effect. What we felt 
most was the injustice of painting everything 
black. As I have already said, there was 
a great deal in America to be criticised. 
Dickens's wrath about copyright, for in- 
stance, was wholly justifiable. Our own 
literary possessions were still meagre, and 
so we stood like highwaymen along the 
roadside of literature and robbed the 
passers-by, the very men who "helped 
us to enjoy life or taught us to endure it." 
To plunder others in this fashion was not 
only indefensible but most dishonest. The 
default on the State bonds, especially 
upon those of Pennsylvania, which edged 
the blade of Sydney Smith, who was 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 61 

a personal loser, was likewise indefensible, 
and was also utterly discreditable. To the 
great reproach of slavery there was, of 
course, no reply, no excuse to be made. 
But these dark spots were not the whole 
picture, and yet by gross misrepresentation, 
and even by actual falsehood, the effort was 
made to prove that everything was black. 
For instance, in " Martin Chuzzlewit " the 
impression is sedulously and strongly given 
that the entire United States west of the 
AUeghanies is one huge swamp breathing 
forth fever and ague. One has but to look 
at the illustrations of Mrs. Trollope's book 
to see the country Dickens described, 
and it would almost seem as if the Ameri- 
can chapters in " Martin Chuzzlewit " were 
written "up" to Mrs. Trollope's pictures. 
No doubt such ugly and unwholesome spots 
existed then, and exist now, but as a de- 
scription of so large a country as the United 
States it was not strictly accurate. Yet 
this was the prevailing tone. Everything 
was bad — land, people, institutions. The 



62 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

result naturally was that the just criticism 
had no effect and was merely lost m the 
cloud of invective and abuse. Many of the 
deficiencies were those which time alone 
could supply, but this was not stated any 
more than it was admitted that there was 
also in America much that was good and 
not a little that was great. In the days 
when we were still colonies Edmund Burke 
and the elder Pitt pictured the people of 
America and what they had achieved in 
language to which Parliament listened then, 
and which the world has heeded ever since. 
In the first half of the nineteenth century the 
American people were engaged in the con- 
quest of a continent ; they were bringing a 
wilderness within the grasp of civilized man, 
and at the same time they were making a 
great experiment m government, and had 
established religious freedom and individ- 
ual liberty on a scale never known before. 
Their political example had affected the en- 
tire Western world, and this was really the 
underlying reason for the attacks upon them. 







, M-^i^-fi 




ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 63 

because their success alarmed the ruling 
classes of England and of Europe, which 
were likewise the vocal classes, in command 
of the press and the platform. None the 
less, these endeavors and achievements in 
that great new world were quite as worthy 
of note as our crude manners, our rough 
ways on the Western frontier, our lack of 
the luxuries of wealth, and of the many 
other lesser things in which we fell short of 
the European standards. But the good was 
never noticed and the bad was exaggerated 
beyond the bounds of truth. With the ex- 
ception of what Dickens and Sydney Smith 
wrote, everything then said and written about 
the United States and its people is quite 
forgotten, except by the historian, and is 
as dead to the world as the nun who has 
taken the black veil. But looking back 
over that time, the period of the English 
commentators on America, one can see 
very plainly now the infinite mischief 
which was done. In point of taste and 
good feeling there is little to choose 



64 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

between the English attacks upon the 
United States and those of Americans 
upon England, although we had the great 
disadvantage of feeling much more keenly 
about it than our adversaries. Yet England 
herself was sensitive enough when Emerson 
and Hawthorne, two really great writers, 
ventured, in the most perfectly proper and 
temperate way, to point out that in certain 
respects the English people were, after all, 
merely human. Emerson and Hawthorne, 
of course, are still read and remembered, 
quite as much if not so widely as Dickens, 
but they do not come within the class 
that I have been trying to describe. 
They were later, and their tone was 
larger and more modern, their criticism 
more subtle, their praise ample, and their 
temper fair. During the time which I 
have attempted to portray the harm 
done was very great. Englishmen gave 
comparatively little attention to us or to 
what we thought or said, but the attacks of 
her writers upon the United States, running 



^/"-t^ «"- T-'^^^yjs;^/^. 




':,^<i'v. v»'ifcAft?-';aif -■■ijiaaaiai. 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 65 

through a period of years, bred a bitter 
hatred of England among the American 
people, which has gradually and fortunately 
grown into a cold but cheerful indifference, 
and this, in turn, it is to be hoped, will be- 
come something more and better than 
occasional friendship between individual 
members of the two nations. 

The regret which one feels as one looks 
back over the writings of that period brim- 
ming over with bitterness and anger is en- 
hanced by considering the good which might 
have been done by more serious works con- 
ceived in a different spirit. We have two 
conspicuous examples of such books ready 
to our hands and possessed of an enduring 
reputation denied to those who wrote of the 
United States only to decry and wound. 
De Tocqueville is of the same period. His 
famous book is by no means filled with un- 
diluted praise. He both warned and criti- 
cised, but he took America seriously and he 
was studied and admired. In our own time a 
distinguished English statesman has written 



66 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

a book upon our body politic and our meth- 
ods of government. He has seen what was 
good as well as what was evil in our politics 
and our political system. He is a severe 
but just judge. Far from resenting his 
strictures, Americans regard his book with 
admiration and as high authority. It may 
be truly said that no Englishman has ever 
been more popular in the United States than 
James Bryce, the author of the " American 
Commonwealth. " 

The final question which arises in one's 
mind when contemplating that time in the 
dry, cool light of history is whether, on 
the whole, it benefited England and was 
profitable to her to breed enmity and bitter- 
ness in a country which had every natural 
disposition to be her friend. The Govern- 
ment had ceased to aim deliberately at alien- 
ating the United States after the treaty of 
Ghent was made ; and then it was that Eng- 
lish writers, great and small, took up the 
work which the Government, for the time 
at least, had abandoned. Their operations 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 67 

were less dangerous because the issues of 
peace and war did not lie in their hands, but 
in creating a settled hate on the part of one 
people for another they were more effective 
than diplomatists and ministers, because 
they wounded personal pride and made each 
member of the community, according to his 
temperament, feel humiliation or anger, in 
his own particular person. To-day such 
writings on the part of the English or of 
any other nation would produce no effect of 
the slightest consequence in the United States. 
After nations pass a certain point in their 
rise to greatness abuse by inhabitants of 
other countries may make the person utter- 
ing the abuse unpopular, but has no effect 
upon the nation or people abused. Be- 
tween 1820 and 1850, when the United 
States was still struggling in the first stages 
of nation-building, when it was still largely 
a wilderness and its pioneers were forcing 
the frontier westward with daring and pain- 
ful effort, this abusive and savage criti- 
cism, whether just or not, was deeply felt. 



68 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

That it had an improving or instructive 
effect upon Americans, in view of the man- 
ner in which the instruction was admin- 
istered, may well be doubted, but in making 
them angry and in turning them against 
England, and causing them to look with the 
friendly eyes of preference on almost every 
other nation, it was highly successful. In 
the relations of two great nations, speaking 
the same language and believing in the same 
political principles, it is not a pleasant period 
to look upon in the clear light of seventy 
years later ; yet I think, if rightly considered, 
it is not without its lesson, not only to those 
concerned, but to all who wish to maintain 
good relations among the nations of the 
earth. 

During this same period, which may be 
called, as I have said, the period of the 
commentators and the critics, certain events 
occurred of a much more perilous nature, 
which brought the two countries to the 
verge of war. In the nature of things, 
we were certain to have many more 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 69 

matters of difference with Great Britain 
than with any other country, because her 
provinces lay s^to the north of the United 
States and furnished a common boundary 
line three thousand miles in length. What 
was much worse was the fact that this boun- 
dary line was left largely unsettled by the 
treaties of 1818 and 1827. One of the three 
treaties of 1827 provided for arbitration as 
to the northeast boundary, and the question 
was referred V^o the King of Holland as 
arbitrator. In \L831 the King rendered a 
decision, but as he really decided only two 
points and merely expressed an opinion as 
to all the others, his award was rejected by 
the United States upon the ground that it 
was not a decision of the questions submitted. 
Thus the entire matter was left open, and 
serious troubles soon began to arise along 
the northeastern boundary between the 
people of Maine on the one side and those 
of the adjdming British provinces on the 
other. An American surveyor was arrested. 
The State of Maine appropriated money and 



70 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

sent a force of men in Aroostook County to 
the border. There were similar difficulties 
in Madawaska. The English Government 
postponed action, and the question began to 
assume a very angry and threatening appear- 
ance. Meanwhile another disturbance broke 
out along the New York and Vermont fron- 
tiers. There had been a rebellion in Canada 
against the bad government of that day, 
and the defeated patriots took refuge in the 
United States, where they met with a cordial 
reception. Considerable bodies of volun- 
teers were raised. Secret organizations were 
formed to support the rebellious Canadians, 
a party of whom, under the leadership of 
William McKenzie, seized Navy island, in 
the Niagara river, and fortified it. The 
authorities in Canada despatched Colonel 
McNab to guard the frontier against this 
invasion, and McNab sent out a party of 
armed men who seized and burned the 
steamer Garoliiie, which had been used to 
convey volunteers and munitions of war to 
Navy island. The destruction of the Garo- 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 71 

line took place at Fort Sclilosser, on Amer- 
ican territory, and was, of course, a gross 
violation of the sovereignty of the United 
States. The Government of the United 
States and the State governments behaved, 
fortunately, with entire propriety and broke 
up and checked, so far as they could, the 
movements of the patriots and their sympa- 
thizers. Nevertheless, acts of violence con- 
tinued on both sides. A party of refugees 
in the Thousand Islands crossed to the 
Canadian side and burned the steamer Sir 
Robert Peel as a set-oflf for the Caroline, 
while the American steamer Telegraph was 
fired upon. It would require a volume of 
reasonable size to give a history of these 
border troubles, which are not without 
much human interest, but which have all 
fallen quite dim now, and indeed are hardly 
remembered except by the historian. In a 
brief review of the relations of England and 
the United States during one hundred years 
it is impossible to do more than allude to 
them. It must suffice to say here that the 



72 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

whole border from Maine to Michigan was 
not only disturbed, but in a most inflamed 
and explosive condition. It was just one of 
those situations where war might have been 
precipitated at any moment by reckless men 
who were quarrelling over the possession of 
land and where a rebellion existed in one 
country which excited warm sympathy in 
the other. In addition, a case arose, grow- 
ing out of the destruction of the Caroline, 
which aroused animosities even more than 
the actual troubles along the border. An 
American named Durfee had been shot and 
killed on the Caroline. Two years later a 
Canadian named Alexander McLeod came 
down from Canada and while he was drunk 
bragged of having himself killed Durfee. 
He was, of course, arrested, although it was 
afterwards shown that he had not been 
present at the destruction of the Caroline. 
But on his own admission it was perfectly 
proper to arrest him. The crime had been 
committed on American soil and McLeod 
had confessed himself to be the guilty man, 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 73 

yet none the less the EngHsh Government 
flew into a fine rage and undertook to inter- 
fere with the action of the courts. Not con- 
tent with this, they also saw fit to ofier their 
advice in regard to the case of the Amistad, 
a Spanish vessel which had been seized by 
the slaves whom she was carrying and had 
been run ashore at Long Island, where she 
was taken possession of by the Government. 
There was a very grave question as to 
what was to be done with the negroes, but 
no part of the question concerned England 
the least in the world, and her benevolent 
advice, coming just at that moment, was 
deeply resented. In this condition of pub- 
lic sentiment, with England on the edge of 
declaring war on account of McLeod, and 
with the popular feehng in the United States 
greatly excited by the border troubles and 
by the case of the Amistad, the Democrats 
went out of power and the Whigs came in, 
with Mr. Webster as Secretary of State. 
The situation was one of extreme and 
dangerous complexity. The British having 



V 



74 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

avowed the destruction of the Caroline to 
be a Governmental act, it was obvious that 
McLeod could not properly be held, but his 
case was in the State courts of New York, 
over the proceedings of which the United 
States had no control. Mr. Webster endeav- 
ored to secure the discharge of McLeod, but 
in vain, and the New York courts refused to 
grant a writ of habeas corpus. On the 
other side, Mr. Fox, the British Minister, 
saw fit to adopt a most offensive tone, 
which Mr. Webster was the last man in 
the world to accept with tameness or in 
a meek spirit. He took a firm attitude 
with England, while suggesting privately 
that negotiations should be opened for es- 
tablishing a conventional northeastern line, 
and, as has just been said, he used his best 
efforts to secure the discharge of McLeod. 
This perilous situation was fortunately 
relieved by two incidents which came to 
pass outside the eff"orts of the Government. 
McLeod was acquitted at Utica by the simple 
V process of proving an alibi ; and the Whigs 




DANIEL WEBSTER 
(From portrait in State Department) 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 75" 

were beaten in England, an event which 
made Lord Aberdeen Secretary of State for 
Foreign Affairs in place of Lord Palmerston. 
As has usually happened since the war of 
1812, we fared much better with a Tory or 
Conservative administration than we did 
with Whigs or Liberals. Kesponse was 
now made to Mr. Webster's proposal to es- 
tablish a conventional line, and in January, 
1842, information reached Mr. Webster from 
Mr. Everett that Lord Aberdeen had deter- 
mined to assent to our proposition, and had 
sent Lord Ashburton as special Minister to 
the United States to settle the boundary and 
all outstanding questions. This marked a 
sharp change in the English attitude, and 
was no doubt owing in a measure at least to 
the confidence which was felt in Mr. Webster 
personally. Indeed, it is to Mr. Webster 
that we owe the settlement at this time of 
questions which had been so inflamed by 
extraneous and accidental circumstances as 
to have brought the two countries to the 
verge of war. 



X 



\/ 



76 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

Mr. Webster's position had throughout 
been one of extreme difficulty. Not only 
did he have to deal with the McLeod case, 
but the border was in a constant ferment 
and he was compelled to be constantly on 
the alert to prevent, if possible, outbreaks 
which might precipitate hostilities at any 
moment. In addition to all this his own 
personal situation was most trying. General 
Harrison, who had made him Secretary of 
State, died a month after his inauguration, 
and, although President Tyler gave his en- 
tire confidence to Mr. Webster, he immedi- 
N^ ately broke with the Whig party, which had 
elected him, and Mr. Webster's position be- 
came, in consequence, a very difficult one. 
The Whigs felt that he ought immediately 
to resign. He was denounced as a traitor to 
Whig principles, and there was much bitter- 
ness of feeling. Mr. Webster, however, 
understood the situation between this coun- 
try and Great Britain better than any one 
else. He knew how dangerous it was. He 
felt, and rightly, that if any one was able to 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 77 

bring it to a peaceful conclusion he could, 
and that whatever his party associates might 
say or think, it was his plain duty to remain in 
the Cabinet until the English question was 
settled. Unmoved, therefore, by the attacks 
made upon him, he remained at his post, 
and it was well for the country that he did 
so. Lord Ashburton arrived in the United 
States on the 4th of April, 1842, and the re- 
sult of his negotiations with the Secretary of 
State was the agreement known in history as 
the Webster-Ashburton treaty, which was 
concluded on the 9th of August, 1842, and 
proclaimed in the following November. 
This result, however, was not easily reached, 
for the settlement was surrounded by diffi- 
culties, owing to the fact that the territory of 
the two States of Maine and Massachusetts 
was involved, and Mr. Webster, therefore, 
could not deal with this territory with a free 
hand. It was very fortunate that Mr. Web- 
ster was a New England man, and his per- 
sonal influence as well as the tact he displayed 
were most effective in managing the arrange- 



V 



V 



V 



78 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

ments with the two States. It is not possi- 
ble to follow the negotiations in their details, 
for the discussion involved filled volumes at 
the time and might be made to fill volumes 
now. All that it is possible to say here is 
that the treaty brought about, in the first 
place, a condition of entire peace between 
the two countries and thus put an end to 
one in which war was momentarily prob- 
able. It settled the northeastern boun- 
dary and the northern boundary from Lake 
Huron to the Lake of the Woods, together 
with various matters related to these two 
questions. It also made an agreement for 
joint effort toward the suppression of the 
slave trade and for joint remonstrances to 
the other Powers against that traffic. It 
further provided in another article for the 
extradition of criminals. As a whole the 
treaty was a most important advance toward 
the establishment of good relations between 
the two branches of the English-speaking 
people. It was one of Mr. Webster's great- 
est achievements, and, in view of the extreme 




LORD ASH BURTON 
(From portrait in State Department) 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 79 

irritation existing and the incipient border 
warfare, it was a very remarkable feat. 
Benton denounced the treaty in the Senate 
as a surrender to England, and Lord Palm- 
erston assailed it in Parliament as a surrender 
by England to the United States ; from 
which it may be inferred that it was, upon 
the whole, a very fair settlement. 

The Webster-Ashburton Treaty had, how- 
ever, one defect ; it did not determine our 
northwestern boundary beyond the Rocky 
Mountains. That region, it will be remem- 
bered, under the treaties of 1818 and 1827 
was left to the joint occupation of Great 
Britain and the United States, although 
Mr. Monroe had offered to end the dispute 
by adopting the forty-ninth parallel as the 
line of division. The country for some time 
remained unsettled, but the Hudson Bay 
Company finally started to push its posts 
down to the Columbia River, and just when 
Mr. Webster was at work on the treaty with 
Lord Ashburton the American movement 
toward Oregon began in earnest. As soon 



v^ 



v/ 



80 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

as our settlers arrived there troubles at once 
arose, and the question drifted into the do- 
main of politics. The failure of the Web- 
ster- A shburton Treaty to deal with it and 
the absorption of the Administration in the 
much greater question of the annexation of 
Texas kept the whole matter open with in- 
creasing irritation, although Mr. Tyler re- 
newed the offer of the forty-ninth parallel, 
to which Great Britain paid no attention. 
The American rights and claims were taken 
up with noisy enthusiasm in different parts 
of the country, and were put forward by 
public meetings in the largest possible way. 
When the election of 1844 came on, the 
Democrats took extreme ground in their 
V platform, claiming the whole region which 
was in dispute, and the cry of " Fifty-four 
forty or fight" ran through the campaign. 
The excitement was enhanced by the failure 
of Congress to act, for there were many 
Senators and Representatives from the older 
parts of the country who regarded Oregon 
as worthless, and who resisted all efforts to 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 81 

take action in regard to it. Mr. Polk, the 
Democratic candidate, was one of the ex- 
tremists on the question and in favor of the 
54-40 line. Nothing could have been less 
desirable than this attitude. It is never well 
to threaten, and it is particularly undesirable 
to threaten unless you mean just what you 
say. The people who were responsible for 
the cry of '* Fifty-four forty or fight " did 
not really intend to fight for that line, and 
therefore the cry was mere bluster for politi- 
cal purposes. It had, however, the effect of 
inflaming the question, so that there was 
talk of war on both sides of the Atlantic. 
When Mr. Polk came in, he took very ex- 
treme ground in his inaugural, which had, as 
was to be expected, a very bad effect in Eng- 
land, and increased the difficulty of a settle- 
ment. After all his bluster, however, Polk, 
with the very lame excuse that he was in- V 
volved by the acts of his predecessor, renewed 
the offer of the forty-ninth parallel, which 
Mr. Pakenham, the British Minister, who 
was apparently about as judicious* as Polk, 



82 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

promptly, and, as it afterward appeared, 
without authority, decHned. President Polk 
in his Message asked Congress for authority 
to terminate the convention of 1827. Res- 
olutions were passed and the convention 
was terminated. The situation had now be- 
come so threatening that Mr. Webster made 
a strong speech at Boston in which he de- 
nounced the folly of going to war with 
England on such a question and urged its 
proper settlement. The speech made a deep 
impression not only in England and Amer- 
ica, but in Europe. Pakenham, under in- 
structions from the Ministry, then renewed 
on his side the offer of the forty-ninth 
parallel, and the valiant Polk accepted it 
with the approval of Congress. The treaty 
of 1846 followed, by which the Hue to the 
coast was settled. We obtained the Oregon 
country and granted to Great Britain the 
right of navigation on the Columbia River. 
The loss of the region between the forty- 
ninth parallel and the line of 54-40 was one 
of the most severe which ever befell the 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 83 

United States. Whether it could have been 
obtained without a war is probably doubtful, 
but it never ought to have been said, offi- 
cially or otherwise, that we would fight for 
54-40 unless we were fully prepared to do so. 
If we had stood firm for the line of 54-40 
without threats, it is quite possible that we 
might have succeeded in the end ; but the 
hypotheses of history are of little practical 
value, and the fact remains that by the 
treaty of 1846 we lost a complete control 
of the Pacific coast. 

It is impossible, nor is it necessary here, 
to enter into the controversies which arose 
from the annexation of Texas and in which 
England took no little interest, but the 
great movement of expansion which charac- 
terized that period brought on another 
difference with England which at one time 
was very serious and which resulted in a 
treaty that was for many years a stumbling- 
block in the way of all plans for building 
an Isthmian canal. From the time of Mon- 
roe, Clay, and John Quincy Adams the 



84 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

construction of an interoceanic canal had 
been one of the cherished desires of the 
United States. It passed through many- 
phases, involved as it was in the tortuous 
and revolutionary conditions of Central 
America, but the question finally came to 
a head after the annexation of Texas. 
Great Britain had always, despite treaties 
to the contrary, maintained a hold on the 
Mosquito Coast and was in the habit of 
exercising a protectorate over a person, 
whom she humorously called the " Mos- 
quito King," selected from the worthless 
savages who inhabited that region. She 
now took advantage of this interest in the 
Mosquito Coast to take possession of San 
Juan, which was at the mouth of the river 
where it was planned to begin the Nica- 
ragua Canal. On the other hand, the 
United States engaged in the work of 
making arrangements with the Central 
American republics and with Granada to 
get possession of the canal routes. It is 
not necessary to follow the treaties made 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 85 

by Mr. Hise and later by Mr. Squier in 
which they exceeded their instructions and 
secured for us everything we desired. 
With England at the mouth of the San 
Juan and indulging herself in the seizure 
of Tigre Island, and with the United States 
possessed of treaties entered into by the 
people of the countries through which the 
canal must pass, all the conditions were 
ripe for a very pretty quarrel, which there- 
upon duly arose. There is no necessity 
of following it in all its intricacies, but 
the result was a treaty hastily made by 
Sir Henry Bulwer, the British Minister, 
and Mr. Clayton, Secretary of State, in 
order to forestall action upon the Squier 
treaty by the Senate. 

The treaty thus made in 1850 provided 
that neither the United States nor Great 
Britain should ever obtain or maintain for 
themselves any exclusive control over the 
ship canal, or maintain any fortifications, 
or assume or exercise any dominion over 
Nicaragua, Costa Rica, the Mosquito Coast, 



86 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

or any part of Central America. The 
treaty tether provided for the neutrality 
of the canal in case of war and for the 
protection of its construction, which both 
Powers promised to facilitate. It also ar- 
ranged for guarantees of neutrality and for 
invitations to other Powers to cooperate. 
This agreement settled the outstanding 
differences between England and the 
United States, but it was pregnant with 
other difficulties hardly less serious. In 
its nature it was an abandonment of the 
Monroe Doctrine, because it provided for 
bringing in European Powers to deal 
with a purely American question, and also 
made it impossible for either the United 
States or Great Britain to build a canal 
without mutual cooperation. In process 
of time it became necessary to get rid 
of this treaty, which was a most unwise 
one. It undoubtedly removed a subject 
of great irritation at the moment, but it 
did so by agreements which carried 
with them the seeds of future troubles, 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 87 

always a perilous price to pay for tem- 
porary relief. 

Nevertheless the immediate effect was 
soothing, and the next transaction between 
the two Governments was the treaty of 
1854, which established reciprocity with 
Canada, and which, as was said at the 
time, was floated through by Lord Elgin 
upon seas of champagne. Although this 
treaty in its practical operation proved a 
disappointment to the United States, it 
was at least a distinctly friendly arrange- 
ment and indicates how much relations 
between the United States and Great 
Britain, despite many vicissitudes, had im- 
proved since the war of 1812. This was 
shown even more emphatically a few years 
later when the Prince of Wales, then a 
boy of eighteen, came to the United States 
in the year 1860. Although the fateful 
election of that year was in progress and 
the country was torn by the political con- 
flict, the Prince was received with the 
utmost cordiality by every one in author- 



88 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

ity from the President down, and with real 
enthusiasm by the people. That he car- 
ried away pleasant memories of America 
was made evident throughout his life, and 
especially after he came to the throne, by 
his kindliness and friendship not only 
toward the United States, but toward all 
Americans. What was more important at 
the time, the warmth of his reception in 
the United States deeply gratified the 
Queen and Prince Albert, and was not 
without a marked influence a year later 
when the relations of the two countries 
and the fate of the American Union were 
trembling in the balance. 

The Elgin treaty, and, still more, the 
visit of the Prince of Wales just on the 
eve of the Civil War, came at a time 
when the people of the United States 
were so deeply absorbed in the slavery 
question at home that they had little 
thought to give to their relations with any 
foreign country. The passions aroused by 
the slavery struggle were rising to a fierce 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 89 

intensity and the dark clouds of secession 
and civil war were already gathering upon 
the horizon. With the coming of that 
war all that had been gained in the past 
years toward the establishment of perma- 
nent and really friendly relations between 
the two countries, which had been severed 
by the American Eevolution, was lost in 
a moment. During the years which had 
elapsed between 1850 and 1860 the most 
severe reproach uttered by English lips 
against the United States was the contin- 
ued maintenance of negro slavery. The 
reproach was bitterly felt because no an- 
swer, no explanation, no defence, was pos- 
sible. Now the United States was plunged 
in civil war waged by the North for the 
preservation of the Union, and all the 
world knew that the cause of the North 
carried with it freedom to the slaves. The 
people of the Northern States felt that 
under these circumstances and in that 
hour of trial the sympathy of England 
would go out to them at once without 



90 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

either question or hesitation. To their 
utter surprise, the feeling of England, as 
expressed in her magazines and news- 
papers and by the governing classes, was, 
with very rare exceptions, uniformly hos- 
tile. The vocal part of English society 
seemed to be wholly in sympathy with the 
South, and the North could not learn 
until later that the silent masses of Eng- 
land were on the side of the Union and 
freedom. The bitterness of hatred then 
awakened by the utterances of the Eng- 
lish press and English public men can 
hardly be realized to-day. Early in the 
struggle its intensity was manifested when 
the Trent affair occurred. The act of 
Wilkes in stopping the Trent and taking 
from her the Southern commissioners was, 
from the standpoint of the United States, 
entirely indefensible, inasmuch as it was a 
flat contradiction of the American doctrine 
for which the country had fought in 1812. 
Yet in 1861 the people of the Northern 
States hailed the action of Wilkes with 




REAR ADMIRAL CHARLES WILKES, U.S.N. 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 91 

wild delight, and the hatred aroused by 
the English attitude was so great that 
they were quite ready to go to war, al- 
though war at that moment probably 
meant the establishment of the Confed- 
eracy and the final severance of the 
Union. 

It is not easy now to realize the intensity 
of the feeling or the fierce joy which broke 
out everywhere in the North when the stop- 
ping of the Trent with the Commissioners 
of the Confederacy was known. Mr. Charles 
Francis Adams, in his very thorough and 
most interesting paper upon the *' Trent 
Affair," gives a vivid picture of the excite- 
ment and of the manifestations of public ap- 
proval in Boston, whither Mason and Slidell 
had been brought for incarceration in Fort 
Warren. The Governor and the Chief 
Justice, Edward Everett, with his long 
career of public and diplomatic service, 
eminent lawyers, men of the largest business 
and financial interests vied with each other in 
applauding the taking of the commissioners 



92 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

from the Trent, and in sustaining the 
legality of the act. By Governor Andrew 
Mason and Slidell were compared unfavor- 
ably with Benedict Arnold, and Mr. Eobert 
C. Winthrop was denounced as little better 
than a traitor because he sent some wine to 
the prisoners, whom he had known well in 
Washington, and who, shut up in a harbor 
fort in the midst of a New England winter, 
were certainly not enjoying an undue 
amount of comfort. Two days after his 
arrival a great banquet was given to Captain 
Wilkes, and his officers and the speakers, 
among whom were Governor Andrew and 
the Chief Justice, praised Wilkes in un- 
measured terms and gloried in what had 
been done. Boston did not differ from the 
rest of the country, and if such was the 
feeling among the best-informed and most 
conservative classes of the community, it is 
not difficult to imagine what a wave of 
passionate exultation swept over the masses 
of the people throughout the North. The 
reason for all this emotion, and for the 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 93 

violent manifestations of it in speech and in 
the press, lay in the wild hatred of England, 
which had been aroused by the apparent 
attitude of her people, and by the language 
of her newspapers in our hour of trial, and 
was not at all due to the fact that two 
notorious Southern leaders had been cap- 
tured. The fact that the Trent was an 
English ship was the cause of the reckless 
language and unbridled exultation of the 
American people in the loyal North who, 
regardless of consequences, rejoiced in this 
sharp retort to the insults which England 
was heaping upon the United States. 

On the other hand, the English attitude 
in regard to the Trent affair was not calcu- 
lated to improve this situation, although, in 
all candor, it must be said that it is difficult 
to see how England could have, practically, 
assumed any other position than that 
which she actually took, despite the fact 
that by so doing she utterly rejected the 
doctrine which she had upheld and en- 
forced even at the cost of war during 



94 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

the first fifteen years of the century. 
The reversal of England's position and 
her rupture with the past were, at 
once, violent and complete. On Novem- 
ber 11, 1861, Lord Palmerston wrote to 
Mr. Delane:^ 

'' It may be useful to you to know that 
the Chancellor (Lord Westbury), Dr. Lush- 
ington, the three Law officers, Sir G. Grey, 
the Duke of Somerset, and myself, met at 
the Treasury to-day to consider what we 
could properly do about the American cruiser 
come, no doubt, to search the West Indian 
packet supposed to be bringing hither the 
two Southern envoys; and, much to my 
regret, it appeared that, according to the 
principles of international law laid down in 
our courts by Lord Stowell, and practised 
and enforced by us, a belligerent has a right 
to stop and search any neutral not being a 
ship of war, and being found on the high 
seas and being suspected of carrying enemy's 

iProc. Mass. Hist. Society, November, 1911, "The Trent 
Affair," by Mr. Charles Francis Adams, p. 54. 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 95 

despatches ; and that consequently this 
American cruiser might, by our own princi- 
ples of international law, stop the West 
Indian packet, search her, and if the South- 
ern men and their despatches and credentials 
were found on board, either take them out, 
or seize the packet and carry her back to 
New York for trial." 

The opinion of November 11 so histori- 
cally correct did not long endure. It was 
not difficult for the three Law officers of the 
Crown when the event actually occurred to 
slip away by a pleasing gyration from their 
opinion sustaining Lord Stowell and discover 
that the seizure of the Trent was indefensible 
because Wilkes had not taken the ship and 
sent her into a prize court. With this 
wholly preposterous proposition they man- 
aged to bridge over the gulf which separated 
the legal doctrine they had always cherished 
from that of the United States and the rest 
of the civilized world. These ingenious if 
flexible Law officers of the Crown were also 
able in this way to give the ministers the 



96 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

legal shelter necessary to protect them when 
they proceeded to act not m obedience to 
their doctrine steadily upheld for sixty years 
but in accord with their own desires and 
prejudices as well as with the sentiment and 
the passions of the English people at that 
moment. Feeling in England was as violent 
as in the United States and was quite as in- 
temperately expressed. A single example, 
which is a statement in regard to Captain 
Wilkes, will show sufficiently the mental 
attitude of England and the degree of 
calmness which she exhibited. Captain 
Wilkes, it must be remembered, was a 
gentleman as well as an officer of distinction 
and reputation widely known by his ant- 
arctic expedition. The worst that could 
fairly be charged against him was that in 
the Trent affiiir he had acted hastily and 
without orders but in strict accord with 
the English doctrine as to the rights of 
neutrals and in direct contravention of the 
American doctrine on the same point in 
behalf of which the United States had gone 




LORD PALMERSTON 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 97 

to war half a century before. This conduct 
was injudicious, no doubt, but it was neither 
criminal nor disgraceful. Here is what the 
London Times said about Captain Wilkes 
and the American people in November, 
1861: 

" He is unfortunately but too faithful a 
type of the people in whose foul mission he 
is engaged. He is an ideal Yankee. Swag- 
ger and ferocity, built up on a foundation of 
vulgarity and cowardice — these are his 
characteristics, and these are the most prom- 
inent marks by which his countrymen, gen- 
erally speaking, are known all over the 
world. To bully the weak, to triumph over 
the helpless, to trample on every law of 
country and custom, wilfully to violate all 
the most sacred interests of human nature, 
to defy as long as danger does not appear, 
and, as soon as real peril shows itself, to 
sneak aside and run away — these are the 
virtues of the race which presumes to an- 
nounce itself as the leader of civilization 
and the prophet of human progress in these 



98 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

latter days. By Captain Wilkes let the 
Yankee breed be judged." 

One knows not which to admire most, the 
moderation of this statement or the dignity 
with which it is expressed. It makes one 
think of the Eatanswill newspapers and of 
Pott and Slumkey, their immortal editors. 
Yet the Times was at that time not only the 
greatest and most powerful newspaper in 
England but the greatest and most powerful 
newspaper in the world. If the great mastiff 
of the English press could howl in this way, 
it is easy to imagine what the barkings and 
yelpings of Blanche, Tray and Sweetheart, 
and the rest of the little dogs must have 
been like. 

With the popular mind both in England 
and the United States in this condition the 
situation was not only one of the utmost 
difficulty for the administration but was in a 
high degree perilous. The danger was en- 
hanced by the fact that the popular feeling 
was rife among public men in Washington 
who were charged with the responsibility of 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 99 

office. Mr. Welles, the Secretary of the 
Navy, who if we may trust his diary never 
gave way to a generous emotion or praised 
any one if he could possibly help it, seized 
this occasion to send a despatch to Captain 
Wilkes approving and applauding what he 
had done in a most injudicious and extreme 
manner. Congress voted Wilkes a gold 
medal. Senator Sumner and Montgomery 
Blair the Postmaster-General indeed seem 
to have been the only men in Washington 
with one exception who from the beginning 
took a sane and thoroughly wise view of 
the capture of the Confederate envoys. 
That exception happily was the President 
himself, and his attitude was more vital 
just then than that of all other men in 
office put together. There was no doubt of 
his position or of his perfect clearness of 
vision from the very beginning. Mr. Lossing 
the historian saw the President just after the 
arrival of the despatch from Captain Wilkes 
announcing the capture of Mason and Slidell, 
and this is his account of the interview : 



100 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

" The author was in Washington city 
when the news reached there of the capture 
of the conspirators, and he was in the office 
of the Secretary of War when the electro- 
graph containing it was brought in and read. 
He can never forget the scene that ensued. 
Led by the Secretary, who was followed by 
Governor Andrew of Massachusetts, and 
others, cheer after cheer was given by the 
company with a will. Later in the day, the 
writer, accompanied by the late Elisha 
Whittlesey, First Comptroller of the Treas- 
ury, was favored with a brief interview with 
the President, when the clear judgment of 
that far-seeing and sagacious statesman 
uttered through his lips the words which 
formed the key-riote to the judicious action 
of the Secretary of State afterward. ' I fear 
the traitors will prove to be white ele- 
phants,' said Mr. Lincoln. ' We must stick 
to American principles concerning the rights 
of neutrals. We fought Great Britain for 
insisting, by theory and practice, on the 
right to do precisely what Captain Wilkes 




ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
(From a photograph) 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 101 

has done. If Great Britain shall now pro- 
test against the act, and demand their re- 
lease, we must give them up, apologize for 
the act as a violation of our doctrines, and 
thus forever bind her over to keep the peace 
in relation to neutrals, and so acknowledge 
that she has been wrong for sixty years.' " ^ 
Thus at once, even in the first moment of 
excitement, Mr. Lincoln grasped the situation 
and pointed out the true pohcy. Fifty years 
later it is easy to say what a chance was lost 
for an exhibition of the highest statesman- 
ship in not at once making pubhc dec- 

1 " The Civil War in America." Benson J. Lossing. Vol. II, 
pp. 156-1.57. Mr. Welles, Secretary of the Navy, corroborated the 
statement in The Galaxy for May, 187-3, p. 647* : " The Presi- 
dent, with whom I had an interview, immediately on receiving 
information that the emissaries were captured and on board the 
San Jacinto, before consultation with any other member of the 
cabinet discussed with me some of the difficult points presented. 
His chief anxiety — for his attention had never been turned to 
admiralty law and naval captures — was as to the disposition of 
the prisoners, who, to use his own expression, would be elephants 
on our hands that we could not easily dispose of. Public indigna- 
tion was so overwhelmingly against the chief conspirators that he 
feared it would be difficult to prevent severe and exemplary punish- 
ment, which he always deprecated." 

* " Abraham Lincoln, a History." Nicolay and Hay. Vol. V, 
p. 26. 



102 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

laration of the position which Mr. Lincoln 
stated informally in his conversation with 
Mr. Lossing. Had he done so, he would 
probably have committed a blunder of the 
first magnitude. It was not difficult for 
other and lesser men to announce rash judg- 
ments or vow undying hatred of England 
on the one hand or on the other to express 
sound and wise opinions like Mr. Sumner 
and Mr. Blair. But upon the President, and 
upon the President alone, rested the dread 
responsibility of decision and action. He 
understood and gauged the feelings of the 
American people far better than any one 
else. He knew what a tempest of passion- 
ate excitement was sweeping over the coun- 
try. It was so strong that Mr. Eussell, the 
correspondent of the London Times, did not 
think that the government would dare to 
give up the prisoners and expected riot and 
disturbance if it was attempted. To have 
defied public feeling in its first wild outburst 
by announcing that Wilkes had done wrong 
and that the prisoners would be immediately 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 103 

given up would not have been statesman- 
ship but a mad temptation of fate. The 
administration had only been in power 
a little more than six months. It was 
hedged in by perils, it was not strong, it 
had encountered a great disaster at the first 
battle of Bull Run ; it was in no condition 
to stand the shock of popular wrath which 
would have been poured out upon it if it 
had undertaken to give up Mason and Slidell 
at once when the excitement and exultation 
of the public were at their height. Mr. 
Lincoln, therefore, sought for delay and 
suggested compromises. He secured the 
delay, forty days passed, the sober second 
thought asserted itself, Mr. Seward sent his 
memorable despatch, and Mason and Slidell 
were surrendered quietly and without out- 
break of any kind. A month earlier this 
would have been impossible. On the other 
side of the Atlantic the situation was saved 
by the calm wisdom of the Prince Consort. 
The English Ministers were only too ready 
to take advantage of the Trent affair in 



104 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

order to precipitate a war which would 
have insured the destruction of the United 
States. Fortunately, however, they were 
persuaded by the wise counsels of Prince 
Albert, acting through the Queen, by whom 
American kindness to the Prince of Wales 
was still freshly remembered, to modify a 
despatch which, if unaltered, would almost 
certainly have brought on war and the 
establishment of the Confederacy. In his 
" History of Twenty-five Years " Sir Spencer 
Walpole says : 

^ " . . . Fortunately, while the passions 
of the multitude were excited, the judgment 
of two men of high station remained cool ; 
for, on one side of the Atlantic, Mr. Lincoln 
had, fi-om the first, the wisdom to see that 
Captain Wilkes's action could not be justi- 
fied ; ^ and, on the other side, the Prince 
Consort had the discretion to recommend 



^ " History of Twenty-five Years," by Spencer Walpole. Vol. 11, 
p. 45. 

2 "Hansard," Vol. CLXV, p. 522. Cf., on the whole story, 
Lord Selborne, " Family and Personal Memorials," Vol. II, 
pp. 389 seq. 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 105 

that the despatch which the Government had 
drawn up should be modified by the expres- 
sion of a hope and a behef that Captain 
Wilkes's act was neither directed nor approved 
by the Government of the United States." ^ 
Knowing from the moment when the 
news came what ought to be done and what 
must be done, Lincoln, with his large and 
patient wisdom, bided his time. The public 
excitement subsided, and then the President 
surrendered Mason and Slidell. The coun- 
try, unconvinced, accepted his decision, but 
the real feeling of the people was exactly 
expressed in Lowell's hnes : 

"We give the critters back, John, 

Cos Abram thought 'twas right ; 
It warn't your bullying clack, John, 

Provokin' us to fight. 
Ole Uncle S. sez he, ' I guess 
We've a hard row,' sez he, 

' To hoe jest now ; but thet somehow 
May happen to J. B. 

Ez wal ez you an' me.' " 

1 " Life of Prince Consort," Vol. V, p. 422. It ought to be added 
that Lord Lyons, on his own responsibility, extended by twelve 
hours the time alloted to the Government of the United States to 
give their reply. Sir E. Malet, " Shifting Scenes," p. 29. 



106 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

The avoidance, by Lincoln's action, of 
this great peril did not, however, alter — 
on the contrary, it intensified — the hostile 
feeling of the loyal people of the North 
toward England, nor was there anything in 
the utterances or conduct of those who spoke 
for England calculated to produce a change. 
The vilification in the magazines and news- 
papers of the United States and her Presi- 
dent and of all her leaders and soldiers 
continued without ceasing and without 
modification. From British ports and Brit- 
ish shipyards armed vessels slipped away, 
which, although nominally ships of the Con- 
federate navy, pursued in reahty a simple 
career of privateering closely akin to piracy. 
The only one of them which actually came 
into action was destroyed by the Kearsarge, 
and an English yacht rescued the Southern 
officers and the British crew of the sinking 
Alabama. This business of furnishing a 
Confederate navy from the ports and ship- 
yards of a neutral country was continued 
with the covert support of the British 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 107 

Cabinet until the case of the Laird rams 
was reached. 

The struggle which Mr. Adams carried 
on for many weary months not only against 
the British ministry but against the Law 
officers of the Crown, the bench, the bar, 
the vested interests, and the aristocracy of 
England is one of the most dramatic chap- 
ters in the whole history of the Civil War. 
The letters of Mr. Adams are a monument 
of ability, tenacity, courage, and force. The 
culmination came in September, 1863, when 
the rams were about to sail. On September 
1st Lord Russell wrote that her majesty's 
government could not interfere with the 
sailing of the Rams. On September 3d, noth- 
ing of any importance having occurred since 
the letter of September 1st was despatched. 
Lord Russell ordered the Rams detained and 
notified Lord Palmerston, who was in Scot- 
land, of his action. On the same day Mr. 
Adams wrote a note to Lord Russell con- 
taining a veiled ultimatum, so thinly veiled, 
indeed, that war appeared very plainly be- 



108 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

hind the diaphanous curtains of diplomatic 
words. On September 4 Lord Eussell wrote 
Mr. Adams that the matter of the rams was 
under the most '' serious and anxious con- 
sideration of her Majesty's government." 
8till ignorant that his victory was won, Mr. 
Adams sat down and wrote his famous note 
of September 5. To tell the story fittingly 
I will give it in the words of Mr. Brooks 
Adams, taken from his articleupon the " Seiz- 
ure of the Laird Rams," which is as admirable 
in form as it is thorough and complete in 
treatment. 

"That day, September 3d, 1863, when Earl 
Russell's note declining to stop the rams, and 
Mr. Adams's note conveying a veiled ulti- 
matum touching their sailing, crossed each 
other, marked a crisis in the social develop- 
ment of England and America. To Mr. 
Adams the vacillation of the Cabinet seemed 
astounding weakness. On September 8th he 
wrote to Seward : ' The most extraordinary 
circumstance attending this history is the 
timidity and vacillation in the assumption 




LORD JOHN RUSSELL 
(From a photograph) 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 109 

of a necessary responsibility by the officers 
of the Crown.' To us, who look back upon 
the Civil War through a vista of fifty years, 
* the most extraordinary circumstance ' 
seems to be that terrible energy which en- 
abled the United States in the extremity of 
her agony to coerce the nobility and gentry, 
the army, the navy, the church, the bench, 
the bar, the bankers, the ship-builders, the 
press, in fine, all that was wealthy, haughty, 
influential, and supposed to be intelligent in 
Great Britain. And it was as the vent of 
this energy that Mr. Adams, after receiving 
Earl Kussell's letter of September 4th, wrote 
on September 5th, although despairing of 
success, his memorable declaration of war. 
Enclosing a paragraph cut from a Southern 
newspaper which contained the familiar 
threat of burning Northern ports with 
English-built ships, he observed as calmly 
as though he were summing up a mathe- 
matical demonstration : 

'"It would be superfluous in me to point out 
to your Lordship that this is war. ... In 



no ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

my belief it is impossible that any nation, re- 
taining a proper degree of self-respect, could 
tamely submit to a continuance of relations 
so utterly deficient in reciprocity. I have no 
idea that Great Britain would do so for a 
moment.'" 

It was a very great victory, as important 
to the United States and as decisive of the 
result as a hard fought battle, although it 
was won without bloodshed. The escape 
of the rams would certainly have seri- 
ously protracted the war and caused enor- 
mous losses to the United States. To have 
stopped them, as Mr. Adams did, was a 
remarkable feat and a signal service, but 
the action of England, extorted at the last 
moment, did not soften American hostility, 
even though English shipyards then ceased 
finally to send forth privateers. 

In the great life and death struggle in 
which the people of the United States 
were engaged the loss of some merchant 
ships on the high seas was an injury so 
comparatively trifling in its effect upon the 




CHARLES FKAXCIS ADAMS 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 111 

result that it was hardly perceptible ; but 
the course of England which permitted the 
destruction of merchant vessels in this way, 
and which threatened by means of the 
Laird rams to break up the blockade, was, 
in the eyes of the American people, a crime 
of the first magnitude. The leaders of the 
English Cabinet were not friendly, although 
Lord Palmerston, fortunately for us, was 
more indifferent and less actively hostile 
than was generally supposed, and neither 
he nor Lord John Eussell, who was much 
less friendly, was disposed to precipitate war. 
The one outspoken champion of the Con- 
federacy was Gladstone ; but fate so willed 
it that in striving to harm the United States 
he rendered it a great and decisive service. 
It was in the autumn of 1862, a very dark 
hour in the fortunes of the United States. 
The Ministry were preparing to recognize 
the Confederacy. The Queen, since the 
death of Prince Albert, as Mr. Charles 
Francis Adams has recently shown, had 
ceased to interest herself in American affairs. 



112 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

A Cabinet meeting was called for October 
23d, and then the recognition of the Con- 
federacy was to be given. On the 7th of 
October Mr. Gladstone, anticipating the 
action of the Cabinet, went to Newcastle 
and delivered the famous speech in which 
he declared that " Jefferson Davis had 
made a nation." Lord Palmerston saw his 
successor in Gladstone, but he had no in- 
tention of letting him rule before his time. 
He resented the Newcastle speech; he did 
not propose to have Mr. Gladstone force his 
hand, and a week later he sent Sir George 
Lewis down to Hereford to controvert and 
disavow the Newcastle utterances. The 
Cabinet meeting on the 23d was post- 
poned, but the accepted time had passed, 
and never returned. Mr. Gladstone's speech, 
however, did its work in the United States, 
still further embittering the already intense 
and deep-seated enmity toward England 
and her Government. We had friends, it is 
true — some even in the Cabinet, like Sir 
George Lewis — but the general attitude of 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 113 

the English Ministry was such that, while 
it inflamed the enmity of the North, it was 
far from gaining the friendship of the South, 
because, while the South was amused with 
sympathetic expressions and encouraged to 
hope for substantial support, it never re- 
ceived anything of real value, thus being 
left with an unpleasant sense of having 
been betrayed. A system more nicely 
calculated to incur the hostility of both 
sides in the great quarrel could not have 
been imagined, and it does not seem unjust 
to suggest that such a system did not imply 
a very high order of intelligence. Only 
very slowly and entirely outside the Govern- 
ment did it become apparent that the Union 
and freedom had any friends in England. 
The first public man to declare for the 
North was Kichard Cobden, and he was 
followed by John Bright, whose powerful 
and most eloquent speech on the Roebuck 
resolution was one of the greatest services 
rendered by any man, not an American, to 
the cause of the Union. Lord Houghton, 



114 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

then Monckton Milnes, also spoke for us in 
the House of Commons. Mr. Forster was 
our friend, so were John Stuart Mill, Gold- 
win Smith, and Thomas Hughes ; and there 
were others, of course, like these men, whose 
support it was an honor to have. 

The working-men of Lancashire, reduced 
to misery by the cotton famine, were none 
the less true in their sympathy for the 
cause which they believed to be that of 
human rights and human freedom. But 
these voices, potent as they were, were 
lost in the general clamor which arose 
from the clubs of London, from the news- 
papers, and from the reviews. The desire 
to side actively with the South declined, of 
course, as the fortunes of the Confederacy 
sank, but the contemptuous abuse of the 
North went on without abatement. Even 
so late as the last year of the war as 
clever a man as Charles Lever demon- 
strated, in Blackwood'' s Magaziiie, to his own 
satisfaction the folly and absurdity of 
Sherman's great movement. The article 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 115 

appeared just in time to greet Sherman 
as he emerged triumphant at Savannah. 

Sherman's march to the sea, following 
jeers and predictions like those put forth 
by Lever, produced a profound impression 
in England, which then, at last, seemed to 
become dimly conscious that a great war 
had been fought out by great armies. The 
end of the war and the complete triumph 
of the Union cause soon followed. As in 
games, so in more serious things. English- 
men are excellent winners, but, as a rule, 
poor losers, apt to cry out, when they have 
lost, that there has been something unfair, 
and to try to belittle and explain away 
their adversary's victory. In this case, 
however, England showed herself a good 
loser, for the result was too momentous to 
be treated with contempt or with charges of 
unfairness. Moreover, England found her- 
self confronted not only by the success of 
the United States, and the consequent 
consolidation of the Union, but by a very 
unfortunate situation which she had herself 



116 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

created. She had managed to secure the 
bitter hostility of both sides. She had 
given sympathy to the South, but had 
done nothing practical for the cause of 
the Confederacy, and at the same time she 
had outraged the feelings of the Northern 
people and developed among them a bit- 
terness and dislike which, when they were 
flushed with victory, might easily have 
had most serious consequences. It is 
quite true that she had not behaved so 
badly toward the United States as France, 
which had stopped just short of war. 
When England, France, and Spain united 
to exact reparation from Mexico, England 
and Spain withdrew as soon as they dis- 
covered that France intended to establish 
a government of her own creation upon 
Mexican soil. Not only was the French 
Government sympathetic with the South, 
but Napoleon was more than anxious to 
recognize the Confederacy, and took ad- 
vantage of our civil war to fit out the 
Mexican expedition and establish Maximil- 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 117 

iau as Emperor. As soon as the war was 
over we forced France out of Mexico, and 
the unfortunate MaximiUan, an amiable and 
brave man, of less than mediocre capacity, 
was executed by his subjects and thus 
offered up as a sacrifice to his incautious 
reliance upon the French Emperor and to 
his own ignorance of the peril of infringing 
the Monroe Doctrine. 

Yet, despite all this, the people of the 
United States cared very little about what 
France had done, and felt bitterly all that 
the English had said. The attitude of the 
French Government during our Civil War, 
which there is no reason to suppose was 
the attitude of the French people, no doubt 
caused Americans generally to sympathize 
with Germany in the war of 1870, but ex- 
cept for that sympathy we regarded with 
great indifference the French treatment of 
the United States during the civil war. 
Very different was the case with Great 
Britain. As soon as the war was over the 
era of apology began on the part of Eng- 



118 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

land, finding its first expression in Tom 
Taylor's well-known verses upon ttie death 
of Lincoln. The acknowledgment of mis- 
takes, however, produced but slight impres- 
sion in the United States, where there was 
a universal determination to exact due 
reparation for the conduct of England, and 
especially for the depredations of the Ala- 
bama and the other cruisers let loose from 
British shipyards to prey upon our com- 
merce. Attempts were at once made to 
settle these difierences, but the Johnson- 
Clarendon treaty was rejected by the 
Senate, and when Grant came to the Presi- 
dency there was a strong feeling, repre- 
sented by Mr. Smnner, in favor of making 
no demands upon England, but of obtaining 
our redress by taking possession of Canada. 
With a veteran army of a million men and 
a navy of over seven hundred vessels, 
including some seventy ironclads, the task 
would not have been a difficult one. Presi- 
dent Grant and Mr. Fish, however, decided 
upon another course, and were genuinely 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 119 

unwilling to adopt a policy which, however 
justifiable, might have carried the country 
into another war. The result was that 
England sent out a special commission to 
Washington to make a treaty. Mr. Glad- 
stone, who was then prime minister, be- 
haved with manliness and courage. He 
admitted frankly the great mistake he had 
made in his Newcastle speech, and bent 
all his energies to reaching a settlement 
with the United States which would satisfy 
Americans and so far as possible heal the 
wounds inflicted by England's attitude and 
by English utterances during the war. In 
the first article of the treaty of 1871, which 
followed, it is said : 

" Her Britannic Majesty has authorized 
her high commissioners and plenipotentia- 
ries to express in a friendly spirit the regret 
felt by her Majesty's Government for the 
escape under any circumstances of the 
Alabama and other vessels from British 
ports and for the depredations committed 
by those vessels." 



120 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

It must have been a serious trial, not only 
for a Ministry but for a proud and powerful 
nation, thus formally and officially to apolo- 
gize for its past conduct, and yet, unless 
England was ready for war and for the loss 
of Canada, no other method seemed possi- 
ble. It is greatly to England's credit and 
to the credit of Mr. Gladstone's Government 
that they were willing to express their re- 
gret for having done wrong. 

The treaty established a court of arbitra- 
tion to consider and pass upon the claims. 
It also provided for referring the differences 
in regard to the line of our boundary 
through the Fuca Straits to the Emperor 
of Germany, who subsequently made an 
award wholly in favor of the United States. 
The treaty also dealt with many other 
questions, including fishery rights, the navi- 
gation of the St. Lawrence and of Lake 
Michigan, the use of canals, and the convey- 
ance of merchandise in bond through the 
United States. In due course the Alabama 
claims were taken before the Geneva tribu- 




-_ ^r t^_oTrT_ii '^''V^^U^ ^^^^.X^H__Y.^^^'^ 




THE LAND OF LIBERTY 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 121 

nal. The arbitration came dangerously 
near shipwreck, owing to the projection into 
it of the indirect claims, so called, which 
were urged in a powerful speech by Mr. 
Sumner in the Senate, but the tribunal 
wisely excluded them, and the case came to 
a decision, an award of $15,500,000 being 
made to the United States for the damages 
caused by the Alabama and her sister ships. 
So far as the official relations of the two 
countries were concerned, the treaty of 
Washington restored them to the situation 
which had existed before the Civil War. 
Once again we were, officially speaking, on 
good and friendly terms with Great Britain, 
but the feeling left among the people of the 
United States by England's attitude re- 
mained unchanged, and the harsh and bit- 
ter things which had been said in Eng- 
land during our days of trial and suffering 
still rankled deeply. This was something 
which only the passage of time could mod- 
ify, and the wounds which had been made 
took long to heal, although the healing 



122 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

process was facilitated by the fact that the 
civil war had made the people of the 
United States profoundly indifferent to 
foreign criticism. There was, moreover, no 
clash between the countries until many 
years after the treaty of Washington, and 
when the next difficulty arose it came not 
from any immediate difference between 
England and the United States, but grew 
out of an English invasion of the Monroe 
Doctrine in South America. 

For many years there had been a dispute 
between England and Venezuela as to the 
boundary between that country and the 
possessions of England in British Guiana. 
Venezuela, weak and distracted by revolu- 
tion, had sought more than once for arbi- 
tration, which England would not grant. 
On the contrary, the British Government 
had steadily pushed its line forward and 
extended its claims until it was found that 
it Avas gradually absorbing a large part of 
what had always been considered Vene- 
zuelan territory. Venezuela had broken off 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 123 

diplomatic relations, but nothing had suc- 
ceeded in checking the English advances. 
The offer of the good offices of the United 
States had been equally fruitless, and 
when the matter finally reached a crisis, Mr. 
Cleveland, on December 17, 1895, sent in 
his well-known message. After reviewing 
the Venezuelan question and the efibrts that 
we had made toward a peaceful settlement, 
the President recommended that an Amer- 
ican commission be appointed to examine 
the question and report upon the matter. 
He said that when such report was made 
" it would be the duty of the United States 
to resist by every means in its power as a 
wilful aggression upon its rights and inter- 
ests the appropriation by Great Britain of 
any lands or the exercise of governmental 
jurisdiction over any territory which after 
investigation we have determined of right 
belongs to Venezuela." The Message con- 
cluded with the following sentence : " I am, 
nevertheless, firm in my conviction that, 
while it is a grievous thing to contemplate 



124 ONE HUNDRED YEAR3 OF PEACE 

the two great English-speaking peoples of 
the world as being otherwise than friendly 
competitors in the onward march of civili- 
zation and strenuous and worthy rivals in 
all the arts of peace, there is no calamity 
which a great nation can invite which 
equals that which follows a supine sub- 
mission to wrong and injustice and the 
consequent loss of national self-respect and 
honor, beneath which are shielded and de- 
fended a people's safety and greatness." 
The language employed by the President 
was vigorous and determined. At the time 
it was thought rough. England was sur- 
prised, and operators in the stock market 
were greatly annoyed. The closing words 
of the message, which was a very able one, 
do not seem quite so harsh to-day as they 
did at the time when they were read to 
Congress. President Cleveland, moreover, 
however much Wall Street might cry out, 
had the country with him, and no one to- 
day, I think, can question the absolute 
soundness of his position. 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 125 

With the existing possessions of any 
European Power in the Western Hemi- 
sphere we, of course, do not meddle, but it 
is the settled poUcy of the United States 
that those possessions shall not be extended 
or new ones created. The forcible seizure 
of American territory by a European Power 
would be, of course, an obvious violation 
of the Monroe Doctrine, which this country 
believes essential to its safety; but the 
gradual grasping of American territory on 
the basis of shadowy, undetermined, and 
constantly widening claims, differs from 
forcible seizure only in degree. If, in this 
case, the land in dispute belonged to Great 
Britain, we had nothing whatever to say, 
but so long as it was in controversy the 
United States had the right to demand that 
that controversy should be settled by a 
proper tribunal under whose decision the 
world should know just what belonged to 
England and what to Venezuela. Presi- 
dent Cleveland's strong declaration sur- 
prised England, but it brought her to terms. 



126 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

She woke up to the fact that the day had 
long since passed when the United States 
could be trifled with on any American 
question, and the soundness of Mr. Cleve- 
land's judgment was shown by the fact that 
within a year the question was referred to 
a tribunal which met in Paris and which 
consisted of two Americans, two English- 
men, and one Russian jurist. The Ameri- 
can judges were Chief Justice Fuller and 
Mr. Justice Brewer, of the Supreme Court. 
They went to Paris with the somewhat 
innocent idea that they were to hear the 
case and decide it on its merits, ex- 
actly as they decided a case in their own 
Supreme Court. They found, however, 
that the two English judges had no such 
conception of their functions, but were 
there as representatives of England, hold- 
ing the positions of advocates instead of 
judges. The result was that the decision 
rested with the fifth man, Mr. Martens, 
and he, apparently under instructions not 
strictly judicial, was prepared to decide 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 127 

entirely in favor of England, althougti the 
English case for a large part of the claim 
was of the most shadowy character. It 
was very important, however, to England 
that the award should be signed by all 
the arbitrators, and that which was most 
essential to Venezuela was to preserve her 
control of the mouths of the Orinoco. The 
American arbitrators consented to sign the 
award if the mouths of the Orinoco were 
left to Venezuela, and this was done, all the 
rest of the disputed territory going to 
England. If the rest of the territory be- 
longed to England, the mouths of the 
Orinoco also should have been hers. If 
the mouths of the Orinoco belonged to 
Venezuela, England was not entitled to a 
large part of what she received. In other 
words, the judgment of the arbitral tribunal 
was a compromise and not a decision on 
the merits of the case, in which it followed 
the course of most arbitrations and dis- 
closed the weakness of which arbitral 
tribunals have hitherto nearly always been 



128 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

guilty. This failing is that they do not 
decide a case on its merits, but make a 
diplomatic compromise, giving something 
to each side. It is this tendency or prac- 
tice of arbitral tribunals which has caused 
them to be distrusted, and especially in the 
United States, because, while the United 
States has no questions in Europe, Europe 
has many questions of interest in the West- 
ern Hemisphere, and the result has been on 
more occasions than one that the United 
States has been drawn into an arbitration 
where it could gain nothing and was certain 
to lose if any compromise was effected. In 
this particular instance, however, the result 
which Mr. Cleveland desired and which he 
sought to reach by his Message was fully 
attained. The boundary was determined, 
the process of gradual encroachment upon a 
weak American state under cover of claims 
more or less artificial and advanced by a 
powerful European nation was stopped, and 
an end was put once and for all to the plan 
of securing new American possessions by 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 129 

the insidious method of starting and de- 
veloping claims and then refusing to have 
the claims settled and boundaries deter- 
mined by any impartial tribunal. Mr. 
Cleveland rendered a very great public 
service by his action and caused the Powers 
of Europe to understand and appreciate 
the force and meaning of the Monroe 
Doctrine as they had never done before. 

Three years after President Cleveland's 
Venezuelan Message the United States was 
at war with Spain. Admiral Dewey's fleet 
had captured Manila and the great Euro- 
pean Powers hastened to send war-ships to 
the scene of action. Some of these vessels 
were more powerful than any which Ad- 
miral Dewey had in his fleet, and the Ger- 
man Admiral behaved in a way which 
came very near bringing on serious trouble 
between his country and the United States. 
Admiral Dewey's firmness put an end to 
the disagreeable attitude of the Germans, 
but he at the same time received assurances 
of support from Captain Chichester, in 



130 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

command of the English ships, which were 
of great value. This almost open act of 
friendliness, which recalled the old days 
in China when Commodore Tatnall went 
to the aid of the English, declaring that 
"blood was thicker than water," was merely 
representative of the attitude of the English 
Government. The sympathies of Europe 
were with Spain, but England stood by the 
United States, and this fact did more to 
wipe out the past and make the relations 
between the two countries what they 
should have been long before than all 
the years which had elapsed since the 
bitter days of the Civil War. 

England's attitude, moreover, toward the 
United States during the war with Spain 
was only a part of the general policy of the 
Government then in control. When the 
Panama Canal, the interest in which had 
been steadily growing, reached a point 
where the United States was determined 
that the Canal should be built, it was found 
that the Clayton-Bulwer treaty was a 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 131 

stumbling-block to any movement on the 
part of the United States. The American 
feeling was so strong that Congress was 
only too ready to abrogate the treaty by its 
own action, but, the question being brought 
to the attention of Lord Salisbury, the 
English Government showed itself more 
than willing to join with the United States 
in superseding the Clayton-Bulwer treaty 
by a new one under which the United 
States should have a free hand in dealing 
with the Canal. The first Hay-Pauncefote 
treaty failed, owing chiefly to its having 
incorporated in it a provision by which it 
was agreed that the Powers of Europe 
should be entitled to join in the neutraliza- 
tion of the Canal. This, on our part, was 
of course inviting the destruction of the 
Monroe Doctrine, and the Senate amended 
the treaty. England refused to accept the 
Senate amendments, but proceeded to make 
with us a second treaty which conformed 
to the changes proposed 'by the Senate, and 
this was ratified without opposition. 



132 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

The policy manifested by the attitude of 
England in regard to the Canal question, 
which came soon after the end of the 
Spanish War, was closely followed, and 
was indeed enlarged, by Mr. Balfour when 
he succeeded Lord Salisbury as Prime 
Minister. President McKinley, in his de- 
sire to settle all possible outstanding ques- 
^ tions with Great Britain — questions which 
related entirely to Canada — had brought 
about a meeting of an Anglo-American 
commission in Washington. It became 
evident that all questions could be easily 
arranged, with the exception of the Alaskan 
boundary, and upon that the difference was 
so sharp that the commission adjourned 
without having reached any conclusion at 
all in any direction. All the other differ- 
ences remained in abeyance, but the Alas- 
V kan question became constantly more per- 
ilous. Nations, like men, will fight about 
the possession of land when they will fight 
about nothing else, and the Alaskan ques- 
tion, which caused a great deal of feeling in 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 133 

the Northwest, was rapidly approaching the 
dangerous stage. A treaty to submit the 
boundary of Alaska to an international tri- 
bunal, consisting of three Americans and y 
three representatives of Canada and Great 
Britain, was made and ratified in 1903. 
The English representatives were two dis- 
tinguished Canadians and Lord Alverstone, 
the Lord Chief Justice of England. The 
case was fully argued, and the decision was 
almost wholly in favor of the contention of / 
the Unites States, which was owing to the 
action of Lord Alverstone, who decided in 
the main against the Canadian claim. 

Thus the one question which was preg- 
nant with real danger was ehminated, and 
the other questions with Canada were 
rapidly disposed of during the succeeding 
years of President Koosevelt's Administra- 
tion while Mr. Root was Secretary of State. 
One treaty settled the international boun- 
dary, another provided for the protection 
of the fisheries on the Lakes, another for 
the international waterways, and, finally, 



/ 



134 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

the long-contested question of our rights 
in the Newfoundland fisheries went to The 
Hague for determination under a treaty 
framed by Mr. Root. 

All these important agreements which 
made for the best relations between Great 
BHtain and the United States grew out of 
the attitude of England at the time of the 
Spanish War, and were due to the policy 
of which Mr. Balfour in particular, and 
Lord Lansdowne, the Secretary of State 
for Foreign Affairs, were the chief expo- 
nents. In a speech at Manchester Mr. 
Balfour said : 

''The time may come — nay, the time 
must come — when some statesman of au- 
thority, more fortunate even than President 
Monroe, will lay down the doctrine that 
between English-speaking peoples war is 
impossible." 

To that sound policy Mr. Balfour and 
Lord Lansdowne strictly adhered, and to 
their action we owe both the settlement of 
all these differences with our northern neigh- 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 135 

bor, which have so perplexed us and, as 
a necessary consequence, the good relations 
which now exist between Great Britain and 
the United States, and which it is to be 
hoped will always continue. The policy 
might have been adopted in 1798 as well 
as in 1898, but Mr. Balfour and Lord 
Lansdowne were the first English statesmen 
who not only saw, but put into effect their 
belief, that the true policy for England was 
to be friends with the United States, and 
that friendship could be brought about by 
treating the United States, not as had been 
the practice in the past, but as one great 
nation should always be treated by another. 
They came to us, it is true, in the hour of 
our success, but none the less they are 
entitled to a place in the memory of Ameri- 
cans with Burke and Fox and Chatham, 
with Cobden and with Bright, who did not 
forget the common language and the com- 
mon aspirations for freedom in the days 
when the Americans were a httle people 
struggling to exist, or in those darker 



136 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE 

days when the government of the United 
States was trying to preserve the unity 
of the great nation which Washington had 
founded and which Lincoln was destined 
to save. 



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IV. Newspapers as Historical Sources. — A paper read before the American Historical 

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of works on the Civil War." — Boston Evening Transcript. 

"The lecturer's study of a war which marks an important epoch in mod- 
em civilization is an admirable piece of work." — Lotidon Athenceum. 

"The author seems to us to be eminently fair in dealing with historic 
facts. The book is written in fine spirit and will be a welcome addition to 
the literatvire of the subject." — New York Baptist Examiner. 

"From every point of view this is a study of exceptional quality." — 
Washington (D.C.) Star. 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New Tork 



C15 80^ 








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